BRIANA SPARREY
One Wrestler's Journey into the Ring
“[Wrestling's] what inspired me as a kid, and I wanted to be able to inspire others as well.”
A young girl sits across from her television, engrossed by the action on the screen. It isn’t a cartoon like "Scooby-Doo" or another children's show. Surrounded by her older siblings, a 7-year-old Briana Sparrey found herself falling in love with wrestling.
Years later, Sparrey found herself feeling very lost in life at college. However, feelings of doubt and uncertainty eventually led to making a childhood dream a reality. “I didn’t want to feel like that anymore and I knew I wanted to start training for wrestling,” she says.
Written by Aysha Ashley Househ, Edited by James Tinsley, Photographed by Kate Lavin
The 25-year-old is now a freelance professional wrestler. As she was growing up, wrestlers became superheroes in Sparrey’s eyes because they were able to tell her a story during a match.
“That’s what inspired me as a kid, and I wanted to be able to inspire others as well,” she says.
And it seems that she’s been able to do just that. Young boys and girls approach her, wearing T-shirts from her merchandise line, to tell her they want to be wrestlers too.
Although Sparrey has now found the place where she feels she belongs, it took overcoming some challenges to get there. After deciding to wrestle, she began training in 2013. Though she had always been in shape, she was not in “wrestling shape,” as she puts it. She lifted weights and ate more to add 25 pounds of muscle so she’d be able to lift and practice with men. It took two years for her trainer, Shaun Buckley, to deem her ready for her first match.
“Generally with me it’s a long process because I want to make sure that you’re going to go out there and have the best possible match you can for your first time,” Buckley says.
It was important to learn to protect herself from getting hurt during early training, Buckley says. She learned how to roll and how to fall in a way that protected her from getting hurt when fighting an opponent. The beginning training was all about repetition, which Sparrey didn’t enjoy.
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“I know she used to hate practice because she was like, ‘Ugh, we just keep doing the same things over and over.’ But that’s what it takes,” Buckley says.
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And that’s why mastering those moves is so important. Within the first month of training, Sparrey broke her leg making the wrong move. After a wrestler acquires the basics, the key to completing is learning what moves to use and when, to be able to “tell the story” during a match. Even with all the hard work that comes with training, she doesn’t mind the demanding nature of wrestling.
“I’ve never been more passionate about anything in my entire life,” she says.
The hard work paid off. Her very first match was also a championship match, which she won.
“It was the most amazing feeling. It was surreal,” she says.
Just recently, she achieved one of her dreams. Women are rarely part of the main event of a wrestling match because they are still seen as attractions rather than athletes. But Sparrey broke that stigma and was the main event at a match that lasted 30 minutes, her longest time. “I cried after, I was so happy,” she recalls.
However, with victories, also come losses. Sparrey’s first loss was not just at a regular match, but at a championship match. Although this loss hurt, she believes it was a learning curve.
“I think it needed to happen because it made me work even harder than how I was working before,” she says.
When Sparrey first began college, she considered quitting because she didn’t know what she wanted. The one thing she was certain of was wrestling. Her mother, Mary Ellen Griffin, disagreed with this idea, so it took some time to convince her. Griffin says she didn’t know how serious her daughter was about wrestling as a profession, creating a miscommunication.
“That’s probably my way of maybe nudging the situation to see if you really want to do it,” Griffin says.
Eventually, Sparrey proved just how serious she was, and Griffin says she worked extremely hard at the sport.
Sparrey’s time was divided between training, school, working two jobs and driving to events.
“She’s very remarkable,” Griffin says. “I just love the whole thing and I love her.”
Now, Sparrey is a graduate student in communications and training at Lewis University near her home in Romeoville, Illinois.
Sparrey tours the nation, and in the Chicago area, she frequently has matches with Chicago Freelance Wrestling. As a wrestler, she prefers to use a stage name, Kylie Rae, because it’s a way to help her feel less anxious when she goes up for a match. It’s also because she wants to keep her personal and career life separate.
"I’m already so raw and vulnerable in front of them in the ring,” she says.
Sparrey’s goals include wrestling internationally, maybe in Japan or Mexico, and making it to the World Wrestling Entertainment level. To reach that goal, she says, it's all about working hard, having good matches, and regularly sending videos of herself in the ring to her WWE recruit page. Rejection can be discouraging, but Sparrey remains optimistic.
“If you focus on yourself then, eventually, one day you’re going to get it.”
