Valentina Rossi recently spoke to Steve Fall of SEScoops about her time in Women of Wrestling and why she decided to part ways with the company.
Valentina Rossi has been a constant mainstay talent on AEW Dark and AEW Dark: Elevation where she’s faced wrestlers like Nyla Rose, Marina Shafir, Abandon, and others.
However, before her time working as an enhancement talent in AEW, Rossi attended castings to join Women of Wrestling. At WOW, Rossi worked with the company to learn to wrestle and create her character.
Rossi detailed what the WOW castings were like for her:
“So they just, the casting was just like, \'Do you have any athletic background? Tell us about yourself. Show us your personality.\' And I was like, \'Oh, I\'m from Jersey.\' And they\'re like, \'Oh my god Jersey, like you\'ve got so much personality.\' And I was like... So, they off the bat, they kind of just like got the whole Jersey girl thing.
And then once I was like in it, they\'re like we got to start developing a character and like the Italian thing was always like my first go to just because like it is me. It\'s very easy for me to like play up. So, I was like, \'Oh my god like this is perfect.\'
And it\'s it\'s actually been fun because I\'ve kind of just like dived deeper into like my culture like I\'ve just like learned so much more about it since then. And like my mom\'s always been big on like teaching me how to like cook and that kind of stuff. But um yeah, they were just like, \'When we look at you would just see like Sopranos.”
WOW Requires Exclusivity
Under Women of Wrestling, Rossi performed under the name of Adriana Gambino because the company wanted to own her name.
Rossi said, “And they\'re also very, like strict about like, the name thing because like, I\'m Adriana Gambino there. And like I came up with the name, but they own it. So it\'s like, it\'s fine. I\'ll just use a different name.”
Rossi decided to move away from working with WOW because of the terms of the contract that she was not comfortable with. One of the terms was in regards to the exclusivity of her activity in wrestling. Rossi says that if she would’ve signed to WOW, she would not have been able to appear on AEW Dark and in NXT.
“Um, so I wasn\'t at this last taping because they did tape this month. I did the taping before. Yes. So they, they\'re kind of exclusive. You can\'t do other TV tapings if you\'re with WOW.\"
Rossi says Women of Wrestling wanted to lock her into a restrictive 5-year contract, which just didn\'t work for her.
\"So, I would have had to like given up NXT and Dark, which I wasn\'t ready to do yet. So yeah, I didn\'t go back this past week and I was actually at Dark during the WOW tapings,” Rossi said.
Rossi\'s Hesitancy To Sign To WOW
Rossi went into further detail on her hesitancy to sign a contract with WOW.
“I think they want just like people who are only gonna wrestle for WOW because they did have like this, because they\'ve been around for like 20 years. And a lot of people don\'t know that because they\'re like, they\'re just starting to, you know, really get well known, and they pretty much did go on like a hiatus for a little bit. That\'s probably just like, the only reason why I was like, I just really can\'t sign this contract because what if you guys go on hiatus again and I\'m under contract for however many years.
But I know that they like- something similar happened with IMPACT. So, I know that they were like using girls from IMPACT for awhile when they were both in AXS. And then as of recently, they don\'t use people from IMPACT anymore. I think it was just like contract stuff. They want people who were like, homegrown so that they can say like, we train them there are people you know.”
Watch Valentina Rossi’s interview with Steve Fall for SEScoops:
