AEW currently have one of the most talented rosters ever assembled by a professional wrestling company, hosting a number of top names from across the independent scene, alongside many former WWE standouts.
One notable exception however, is the inaugural and current TBS Champion Jade Cargill, who made her in-ring debut at AEW Dynamite: The Crossroads in March 2021. We also recently saw the debut of the imposing Satnam Singh, the former basketball player who also began their pro-wrestling career with AEW.
Appearing on the Swerve City podcast, AEW President Tony Khan noted that both Cargill and Singh were great athletes that he gambled on when signing them to AEW.
“First of all, when you look at their body of work coming in, sometimes you get athletes, like Satnam Singh is a great example or Jade Cargill, where they didn’t have prior experience in pro wrestling, but they were great athletes, actually both of them played basketball at a high level. I thought they were worth a gamble.”
-Tony Khan
Khan continued however, acknowledging that these two signings were exceptions rather than the rule, indicating that AEW aren’t planning on focusing on training wrestlers from scratch moving forward.
“We typically don’t take people in who don’t have a lot of prior wrestling experience. We don’t train wrestlers from scratch here. It’s a different business model. There are a lot of great people, but for us, we kind of pick our spots when it comes to that thing, because we’re not as much about centralized training all week long. We come together like locusts in a different city every week and then we go our separate ways. I think for us, having a lot of prior wrestling experience is really important. So for example Swerve is somebody I’d seen wrestle in different promotions and I really loved your stuff. I had seen a lot of your matches before you came in. Some other people might not have as much experience as you and might not have had as much success, or really might not be as far along or as developed or as good. There are other people where it’s hard to track them down.”
-Tony Khan
AEW appear set to debut two new signees in the upcoming weeks, with both the men’s and women’s Owen Hart Foundation Tournament brackets featuring a ‘Joker’ entry, which has typically been used in the past as a way of introducing an unfamiliar face to the AEW crowd.
H/T to RingsideNews for the transcription.
