Shayna Baszler On When She Found Out She Was Main Eventing WWE Survivor Series

Current WWE NXT Women's Champion, Shayna Baszler, was a featured guest on this week's After The Bell podcast hosted by, Corey Graves. During the discussion, Baszler revealed that her history training in combat sports has helped keep her nerves calm when important matches like Wargames take place.

"I've done combat sports for a long time, so I'm kind of at this place where I ignore it all until it's like, 'Oh, it's going to happen; we're like twenty minutes away.' And that is when I start like, 'Oh, holy crap! This is massive.' I think the pressure is always on us at NXT to deliver because it's what the fans expect of us now," Baszler explained. "I, at least personally, start feeling it and we're all back there, and we're all standing behind the curtain, and the siren is going off and the cage is dropping. That was a moment, that was pretty cool."

After her team's defeat in Wargames last Saturday night, Shayna turned her momentum around and actually won the main event triple threat match at Survivor Series the following evening against RAW Women's Champion Becky Lynch and SmackDown Women's Champion Bayley. Baszler explained that a main event of this caliber was enough to really get her nerves active.

"It was still like the show had started and then I started feeling it, because I didn't find out for sure that we were the main event until I got there that day. So, just getting that news. And it's not just like this is a RAW or SmackDown roster debut, this is a pay-per-view debut and a main event debut," Shayna said. "Everything you could do to make this a tough situation was thrown into that – the pressure was on from the start of the day."

Shayna believes that NXT reaching a peak level of greatness and winning Survivor Series this year is due in-part to the organic storylines that formed after WWE stars were delayed in Saudi Arabia at the end of their Crown Jewel event last month.

"I think that for a long time, the people that have followed NXT know what NXT is about. And you can put a lot of names on it but it's something different from RAW and SmackDown, and that's been by design," Shayna said. "But I think that being on TV and then having this that that kind of organically happened in the first place with the roster being delayed in Saudi, this was our moment. Now we can show this bigger audience exactly what we are. And it's a cool story; you hear about all these stories in pro wrestling if you follow it, or you hear about it or whatever. There's all of these cool moments that happened kind of on accident, organically, and we're one of those moments."

You can listen to the full interview above.
If you use any quotes from this article, please credit After The Bell with a h/t to Wrestling Inc. for the transcription.