In an exclusive for WrestlingNews.co, Steve Fall interviewed Billie Starkz. Starkz talked about being inspired by WWE star Bayley, her training to become a wrestler, and more.
Billie Starkz talked about how she got started in wrestling at age 13:
“I was doing photos at the time for wrestling and just going around and taking photos. I was taking photos for Girl Fight. The promoter, Madman Pondo, introduced me to a training school who would train me at 13. That ended up being where I trained at Grindhouse Pro Wrestling. I was still a cheerleader at the time. I went after cheer practice one day and went to wrestling training. They were like, ‘Oh, you want to get in the ring?’, and I’ve never stopped wanting to be in a ring since.”
Bayley was her favorite wrestler when she started watching wrestling:
“I was very attracted to Bayley when I first started watching wrestling, especially her NXT era. I remember a lot of that. I was very attached to that part of wrestling. There’s still like a part of me who will go back and watch the matches and be like, ‘Oh, this is so nice.'”
On showing up to school with bruises from training:
“It was definitely very strange for my teachers to see these things. In my middle school, everybody kind of just found out and it was like, ‘Oh, she’s a wrestler. It’s fine.’ Then when I went to high school, I didn’t think anything of it because I was in middle school and everybody didn’t really care. Then my first two weeks of high school, I had a teacher pull me out in the hallway and bless her heart, she was like, ‘Hey, these past few weeks, you’ve just been covered in bruises. Is everything okay at home?’ I’m confused. I’m like, what is this woman talking about? Then it was like, ‘Oh, you think I’m getting beat? Please don’t call CPS on my mother.’ I explained that I was a pro wrestler and showed her videos and then it slowly leaked to everybody else. I remember freshman year, my career options class, my teacher would play my wrestling videos in front of the entire class. I was like, Oh, this is nice. But I’m also one of those people that I don’t like watching my matches in front of people. So I have all my classmates and peers just watching me, and I was like, okay.”
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