NXT Advent Calendar Day 14: A young Bayley teams... with her future trainer?

Image credit: WWE.com.

Today, we all know Bayley as the NXT woman's champion, a leader of an entire division of amazing female wrestlers, a member of the Four Horsewomen and a future main roster megastar. But she's been around a lot longer than that.

Bayley has been in NXT since 2012, but despite playing a plucky young star, she's actually been wrestling since 2008 when she was just eighteen. As Davina Rose, she came up through several California indies before branching out to SHIMMER and Shine.

She considered Big Time Wrestling her home promotion and in May 2011 at their sixth annual Wrestlefest event, she teamed with none other than Sara Del Rey to take on the  team of Amber O'Neal (now Amber Gallows) and Sassy Stephie. The four women would put on an explosive tag team contest on the card where most of the matches were highlighted by wrestling veterans. (Kevin Nash and Sean Waltman wrestled a local team in the main event.) They were given an impressive length of time, and Davina was able to show why she belonged in a match with the more seasoned competitors.


Just over a year later, Sara Del Rey would retire as an active wrestler to take on the role of a coach for NXT (under her real name, Sara Amato.) Six months later, Davina Rose would become one of her students and take the ring name Bayley.

It must have been a strange experience for Bayley to suddenly be training under one of her former peers, but her time on the indies saw her regularly working with a WWE alum already, former Straight Edge Society member Serena. In the three years since her signing, Bayley has become the face of the NXT women's division and a true testament to how much good Sara's training and the presence of Bayley and the other Four Horsewomen have done for women's wrestling in America.