Willow Nightingale says adding more female voices to the wrestling business is critical in helping propel women’s wrestling forward.
Willow Nightingale was a recent guest on A Wrestling Gal with Ella Jay and talked about how women’s wrestling has progressed in recent years. Asked what she thinks needs to be done next in order to elevate or push it to the forefront even more than it has been, Willow said it needs to be a natural part of a show and people need to stop treating it like a gimmick or booking matches to fill a quota.
“So, I think what we really have to kind of start working towards is stop seeing women’s wrestling as like a gimmick. You know, I mentioned I touched on it a little bit earlier where I was like, ‘Oh, people are doing women’s wrestling shows’ or whatever, just because that’s what’s trendy right now, and they don’t want to receive backlash if they don’t include women on the show. There has to be actual change in the perception, in general, across the board, that women athletes are equal to their male counterparts. In some ways, I like having that distinction of like ‘this is women’s wrestling. We’re going to give us the spotlight,’ but we still see places that are like, ‘Well, this is our one women’s match, so we filled the quota’ or people that won’t have women on their show at all. I think if we can get closer to not having to set a certain number on how many women’s matches are on your card or how much women’s representation is on the card,” Willow explained, “I think that’s really the ultimate goal is to not have to be like ‘need to fill my quota’ and that’s it.
“That’s one thing, and we also need to have women in different positions outside of just being a wrestler. We need to see more referees, more women actually running shows themselves, which, big shout out to Thunder Rosa and the crew at Mission Pro Wrestling. I just had the opportunity to debut for them, and they are truly one hundred percent women-backed, women driving it. They have a women camera crew. The women’s roster is setting up and breaking down the ring. We really are the heart and soul of the operation,” she noted, “and companies like that are what will continue to propel women’s wrestling forward because then it’s not just being represented from a standpoint that doesn’t understand a women’s perspective. Everything is like, ‘Oh, this is how a woman would do this’ and our brains and everything are kind of like spilling into the heart and wrestling.”
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