Teacher Reveals How Sasha Banks’ Appearance at School Wrestling Club Happened

Sasha Banks made a surprise visit to KIPP AMP Middle School’s wrestling club last month, and the teacher in charge of the club recently discussed how it came about. As noted in early May, Banks made an appearance at the Brooklyn middle school’s wrestling club to visit with the kids. Victor Perry, who runs the club, spoke with Cultaholic about the appearance and you can see some highlights below (per Fightful):

On how the appearance came about: “They’ve seen a lot of Sasha matches. She’s one of my favorite wrestlers, so of course, I’m going to show them her matches. It wasn’t until I showed them Bayley and her, Hell in a Cell, that they loved the storyline. It was intense. They could relate to the storyline; your best friend turns on you. I posted a clip on Twitter of the kids reacting, it was during lunch and recess, so after, I went back to teaching. I kept seeing my phone light up throughout the day and was like, ‘what is going on here?’ I looked at my phone and it went viral. ‘This is crazy and kind of cool.’

“I went home, played WWE 2K with my kids, and saw Mercedes Varnado had retweeted and then quote tweeted. ‘Is that Sasha?’ There are a lot of troll accounts that use wrestler’s names so I was like, ‘it’s probably a troll,’ but it wasn’t, it was her. She said she had to come to our school. ‘Is she serious? She saw the video, so that’s cool.’ I showed the kids the next day and they were like, ‘Mr. Perry, you have to bring her to our school.’ ‘I don’t have any connections, I don’t know if that can happen. We’re just going to go about our day. If she says she wants to come, if she had the time, she will.’ A couple months pass, I think it was a month and a half, I got a DM from a person from WWE and they were like, ‘Hey, WrestleMania is over, Sasha Banks saw this tweet and she wants to come to the school. How can we make this happen? We’ll be in New York in four weeks, let’s set up some meetings.’ We had a couple of meetings and it just happened. May 6, I’ll never forget it,” he said.

On the Q&A she did with the students: “There was one question in particular that was asked about ‘how does she separate Sasha Banks from Mercedes and do we see any bit of Mercedes show up on television?’ We watched the documentary, WWE Evil, and she struggled with her mental health as far as trying to figure out who she is vs. the character and why she took that break. Her answer that she shared, which was powerful, it helped my students realize that their authentic selves can show up in any space that they choose to live in and they have to remember that is their authentic self, regardless of what other people might place upon them or see them as. I thought it was a dope way to answer.”

Banks is of course not on WWE TV right now, having been suspended indefinitely alongside Naomi for walking out of the May 16th episode of Raw.