Roxanne Perez discusses signing with WWE.
The 21-year-old star spoke with Fightful about this very topic and detailed how all the hard work she did on the indie scene helped payoff when she eventually got her WWE Tryout. Perez states that certain higher-ups in WWE told her she was good prior to her even coming in.
That felt so cool to me. As a kid, my dream was going to WWE and I was like, ‘I don’t know how I’m gonna get there, but I’m gonna do it.’ Then I find out about the indies and I found out how you can just work your way up throughout the indies and one day maybe they’ll call me. That’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to make a big enough name for myself to where I don’t have to beg. They will contact me and be like, ‘Hey, we want you because your work spoke for yourself.’ When I got there, it was crazy to do my tryout and people were like, ‘Yeah, we know you.’ I would never have expected to come into a WWE tryout and people be like, ‘Yeah, you’re good.’
The former NXT women’s champion also discussed her training at Booker T’s school and how it helped prep her for her eventual WWE tryout.
I definitely did my homework, especially training at Booker T’s school. He prepared me. My boyfriend, Gino Medina, he’s awesome and he prepared me for that tryout. I was ready. He had me doing some crazy cardio. He’s done a tryout before, so he’s like, ‘Yeah, this is what they do,’ and it was way less than what he had me do. But I was over prepared. So that was good.
Perez lost the NXT women’s title at Stand & Deliver in a multi-woman ladder match, which was eventually won by Indi Hartwell. She spoke about the anxieties she had going into the matchup in a separate interview, which can be read about here.