HYAN Recalls Training Alongside Roxanne Perez & AQA At Booker T’s School

HYAN has worked with several top names, and she recently recalled training with Roxanne Perez and AQA at Booker T’s Reality of Wrestling school. HYAN spoke with Fightful and talked about her friendship with both Perez and AQA, the latter of whom is currently on a hiatus from wrestling.

On her friendship with the two: “It’s awesome. It does mean a lot to me. The reason why the women we have in Texas are so good is because; one, our trainers do a very good job of treating us like equals when we’re in training. No one goes easy on us because we’re girls. Even if they do, the guys will get yelled at. I think it’s so funny. We’ll be in the ring and you’ll see a guy go ‘eh’ [imitates a light strike], not wanting to hit the girl, and he’ll literally get yelled at, ‘Hit her hard, hit her how you would.’ Because we have that equality in how we train the girls, I think that’s why they come out so strong. I feel there is this culture of camaraderie between the girls. Roxanne is one of my best friends. AQA, who was on the scene. We all have a little group called Girl’s House and we all literally push each other. Because we’re all friends, we all have a comfortability where we can tell each other, ‘Hey, you fucked up here in this match. What were you doing here? Let’s do this. That’s no really a good idea.’ We can be direct with each other and not hurt each other’s feelings and know that it comes from a place of ‘I want you to be better,’ not a personal attack.”

On growing up in the business with them: “Because we have that friendship, we can have the hard conversations where, if you’re wrestling somebody for the first time, maybe you wouldn’t tell them ‘that wasn’t not good.’ We have those conversations because we’re all friends. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve hosted film study at my house where there is 20 trainees and we have a playlist of matches and we’re all going to go in and talk about why it’s good, what we learned from it, or sometimes we put in a match…we put in a comedy squash match, it was Will Ospreay against Mad Kurt at RevPro. I put it on the playlist and said, ‘this is a match that is comedic, it’s also a squash match, but it’s also a main event match. Let’s watch this match and see what we can take from it, why it was good, and why we like it.’ After, we watch the match, we take notes, and we go around and tells each other, ‘this is what I liked, this is what I learned.’ I feel that’s why the scene is so deep and so many amazing girls have come out and found success in wrestling. I’m so happy for them. It’s awesome.”