Nearly two weeks after her AEW Dynamite debut against NWA Champion Thunder Rosa, Serena Deeb has officially joined All Elite Wrestling. There had been rumors this was coming, but today the company confirmed it in a tweet.
Welcome to the team…
Serena Deeb is #AllElite pic.twitter.com/dgS5v7tJYu— All Elite Wrestling (@AEW) September 21, 2020
Her signing could be huge for the AEW Women’s Division. It’s not that she’s a big star—although she has some indie cred, her brief WWE career is remembered mainly for CM Punk shaving her head, not for any matches she had—it’s that she’s a veteran with coaching experience. Specifically, Deeb became a coach at the WWE Performance Center in 2018, where she was trained in the job by Sara Amato, the woman whose coaching played a huge backstage role in revolutionizing women’s wrestling in WWE. Serena was a coach there for more than two years, before being one of many people at WWE to lose their jobs in April of this year.
Officially, we haven’t heard what her role in AEW might be outside of the ring, but I think it’s reasonable to assume that since her primary experience of the last few years was in coaching, they’ll probably have her doing some of that. She also did some producing at NXT, so there could be some of that too.
Basically, what I’ve been saying for a while now, and others have too, is that the number one thing AEW needs is someone with authority whose job is helping the Women’s Division live up to its potential. Hopefully Serena Deeb can play that role for the benefit of the other women and the company as a whole.
Time will tell if this goes well, or indeed if they even attempt it, but as reasons for renewed optimism about the AEW Women’s Division go, this is one of the better ones they’ve given us.