Kelani Jordan is one of the five participants headed to tonight’s NXT Deadline to compete in the women’s Iron Survivor Challenge, competing against Tiffany Stratton, Lash Legend, Blair Davenport and Fallon Henley for a future NXT Women’s title shot.
She earned her spot with a late-November win over Kiana James.
Ahead of the biggest matchup of her young career, I talked with the former gymnast about her time thus far in wrestling and tonight’s big opportunity.
Her fast rise
Given that WWE NXT is a developmental brand, fans have seen a lot of talents grow on the weekly program with Jordan as one of them. While she had primarily had been working on NXT Level Up and the NXT house show loops for the better portion of 2023, she wasn’t on NXT TV until June when she took part in a battle royal.
Fast forward to October, Jordan was named as one of the eight women taking part in the 2023 women’s Breakout Tournament. After wins over Izzi Dame and Arianna Grace to advance to the finals, she got some good crowd reactions and showcased her athletic ability in an eventual defeat to Lola Vice.
Now, she finds herself on the doorstop of a big opportunity.
“It’s so rewarding. It’s amazing because, like you said, about six to seven months ago, I had my first debut match on Level Up. And so now to see how far I’ve come to be on a major PLE, in the Iron Survivor Challenge, the second one ever, it’s so rewarding. I’m just so happy because I never would have thought so. I’m like, ‘Well, if I can do this in six months, imagine the next six months how far I’ll be.'”
Transitioning from gymnastics
Like a lot of the new crop of developmental students at the Performance Center, Jordan excelled at a different sport before pursuing wrestling. Jordan’s athletic background stems from gymnastics.
While she was attending Michigan State in 2022, she was finishing her fifth year in gymnastics when she received a direct message on Instagram from the WWE recruiting account, asking her if she was interested in attending their tryout at SummerSlam.
Jordan says that when she received the message, she was surprised WWE reached out to her. She ended up taking a chance and ended up getting selected by Paul “Triple H” Levesque to further her training at the Performance Center.
“At first, I’m like, ‘Is this real?’ There’s no way that WWE is contacting me and I was like, ‘You know what? I’m going to go for it.’ So I went down to Nashville, I did the tryout, and thankfully I was blessed with the opportunity for Triple H himself to offer me to come to the Performance Center and start training.
“And that’s how I got into pro wrestling. I never would have thought in a million years that I would be a WWE superstar so being here is so surreal.”
Once she began training, she said that learning how to be safe and rolling in the ring was the easiest part for her to learn, revealing that the most “painful” thing was learning how to hit the ropes.
“So learning how to just control your body with safety, like rolling and stuff, that was the easy part. But hitting the ropes the first time was so painful and just learning how to bump and stuff. That was probably the most painful thing, the most difficult thing ever. Hitting the ropes was the most difficult.”
Given how quickly she has taken to wrestling, Jordan explained to me how her background in gymnastics has attributed to her learning this new sport so quickly.
“I will say it’s very, very different. It’s foreign to me. But then again, the physicality of it helps me a lot because I’m able to catch on to the small details easier, I would say just because in gymnastics, everything is based on perfection. So I have to make sure I know all the details to make sure the margin of error is very small.”
She emphasized that her background in gymnastics has helped her a lot with body control and what she calls “air awareness.”
“I believe that helps me in the ring with like body control and details. Just making sure I’m aware, I have air awareness. So, I believe gymnastics helped me. But then again, it’s so different because I’m not used to having someone hit me or being in the ring with someone else. In gymnastics, it’s just me by myself.”
Key influences
Given that Jordan is so new to the world of professional wrestling, I asked her who are some of the performers she studies. Three very different wrestlers were her answer: Rob Van Dam, Bryan Danielson and Bianca Belair.
“Starting with in-ring wise, I would say RVD is someone whose style I absolutely love. I love also how authentic he is, how unapologetically himself he is. And that’s something that I want to strive to be. I want people to be able to relate to me.
“And then also Bianca Belair: someone because she’s so elegant, but she’s also so powerful and even she has this sass to her where she doesn’t let anyone walk over her.
“And then for promo wise, I love hearing (Bryan Danielson) cut his promos. He’s very energetic and it’s cool to see his evolution of how he started promos to where he was doing promos.”
