Aubrey Edwards is one of the most well-known referees in professional wrestling and she recently appeared on Talk Is Jericho. She discussed several topics, including her stint as a WWE referee and her training school. Here are some highlights:
On her training school:
Edwards: “Female referees are still very, very new, especially at this higher level. There’s a lot more coming up on the indies. A lot of my students, all of my students are female. I train refs up in Seattle. I’ve got a few students, I have trans, male-to-female, and then two other girls, and they’re all fantastic. So it’s nice, it’s literally representation matters, and I’m seeing it every day because one of my students actually drives up from Portland, three hours from Portland to Seattle, to train with me because she’s saw me at Double or Nothing.”
On training to be a referee:
Edwards: “I trained at, there’s a school up in Washington that I previously trained at, I had two guys train me, one was Chris Samuels, who’s a referee, he’s self-taught, he basically wanted to learn how to ref, watched a bunch of WWE, took notes and basically emulated exactly what he saw on TV and then another guy, Steve West, who’s a wrestler, so I had both the referee training as well as the, ‘Here’s how you work with wrestlers’ training. Because there’s the two parts of it, like part of it is the storytelling aspect, but you also have to understand wrestling psychology to fully get what the role is.”
On her work with WWE:
Edwards: “I went, I did a try out, it was during an NXT week, so I had a dark match during a TV taping, and they liked me enough, they brought me in for the Mae Young Classic so I did that, I did another road loop with them, and then I did their all-women pay-per-view, I did the battle royal.”
“They flew me out to New York and I ended up being on the outside of the battle royal for like eight minutes. I think like, total, I worked for them like 16 days, so like never full-time, but you know, kind of the same thing a lot of people end up doing with extra talent, you end up just racking up days with them, but never a full time offer.”
On not getting a full-time offer from WWE:
Edwards: “They kinda just stopped calling me, like I reached out to them again a little while later and they’re like , ‘No, we’ve got nothing for you.’ And then they kinda stopped calling. But I think, given my personality, I don’t think I would have been successful there. I’m really fortunate AEW came around because I feel like this is a much better place for me, for who I am as a person, [and] what I want out of being a performer.”
The full episode is available here:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/5ArlfkXymvYOmQIAE5Shlv?si=fdnMCL-9T8C-y1CicUdZ4g
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