AEW star and former NWA women’s champion Serena Deeb recently spoke with Slam Wrestling about her love of holding seminars, and how cell-phones have drastically changed the way fans interact with the product at shows. That and more can be found in the highlights below.
How she loves holding wrestling seminars:
“I actually love doing seminars. It’s one of my favorite things to do. I’m very detail-oriented with my wrestling so a lot of my seminars end up going into like, correcting very, very minute details that a lot of people probably don’t see or aren’t trained properly. So I have an idea, I have a general outline and I have a way I start and all that. You can’t really write out a whole game plan.” People throw questions at her or it all goes awry, in a good way. The last seminar I did, I had an idea what I wanted to do and it went in a completely opposite direction. And it was really fun because it was just going off of what I saw, pushing into that, rather than what I had potentially planned.”
Enjoys teaching young stars the ins and outs of the business, especially TV wrestling:
“Another thing just to add is breaking down elements of TV wrestling, like how to wrestle on TV,” Serena Deeb said. “There’s so many things like times and commercial breaks, and cameras, and all of these things and being able to adjust on the fly if you have to cut some stuff out and that kind of stuff. These are important things to explain to them as well, because every single person, every trainee in wrestling, I would imagine wants to work for a major company on television at some point. So just try to transfer a little bit of that knowledge as well, and just things to keep in mind as they work indies — try to put some of these things into practice. I like doing seminars right before there’s an indy show, because I always encourage them, ‘Hey, here’s one challenge for the show. Pretend that there’s a hard cam,’ or ‘Pretend that there’s a floor cam.’ Take one element that we discussed regarding wrestling on television, and put it into play in your indy match. And just pick one and start small and then build from there. Then every indy show that you do, keep these things in mind.”
How cell-phones have drastically changed the industry, including for fans:
“It’s funny watching all the wrestling shows this [WrestleMania] weekend, and just seeing three-quarters of the crowd had their phones out, recording. It’s just a totally different landscape now. It’s not the Attitude Era when cell phones weren’t as much a thing, and people were paying attention the whole time. I mean, people are scrolling through Twitter or recording the matches, recording this, recording that — it’s a total cell phone game today, and it’s fascinating to watch. I mean, we’ve come a long way.”
