At just 18 years of age, Millie McKenzie has already accomplished a lot in her professional wrestling career. But this coming Sunday, she takes it up a notch when she competes at Wembley Arena for PROGRESS in the country's biggest wrestling show for 30 years.
PROGRESS, formed in 2012 by Jim Smallman, Jon Briley and Glen Joseph, may well be the hottest independent wrestling promotion in the world right now and recently embarked on a 'Coast to Coast' tour of the United States.
They've ran sold-out events at iconic venues such as Brixton Academy and Alexandra Palace but moving to Wembley, the arena WWE regularly run when they come over to these shores, is a remarkable feat for their 76th show/chapter.
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So too is the fact that an 18-year old who only debuted two years ago, will be an integral part of it - competing for the PROGRESS women's title with stand-out performers Jinny and Toni Storm in a triple-threat match.
"It's a really cool experience and not something I would have expected to happen in the past three or four years I've been doing this," she told SPORTbible when asked how she's feeling about performing on such a big stage.
"I wouldn't have expected to wrestle at Wembley ever, let anyone in that time-frame. I'm very lucky.
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"I'm speechless about it really; I'm so excited and nervous as well because it's obviously the biggest opportunity that I've had, against some of the best girls in the country. Hopefully I stand well with them."
Millie has been a long-time fan of the business, particularly enjoying the work of both CM Punk and Dean Ambrose.
Around Christmas time in 2014 was when she first looked into training as a wrestler and googled wrestling schools in her home city of Coventry - eventually getting the go-ahead from her mum and attending her first session after a couple months of begging.
But as her desire to wrestle for a living increased, so did the workload and balancing it out with education and studies proved to be difficult to begin with.
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"It was very hard at the time," Millie admits.
"I trained at that place for a couple of years, then I started training at 'Fight Club', which was three times a week and then I started to do shows three times a weekend and stuff.
"It was getting tiring because I was working at the weekends and I was still at school five days a week. But when I was in Year 12, my first year of sixth form, and doing my A-levels - all I could think about was wrestling.
"That's where my passion was and that's when my priority shifted towards wrestling - obviously I was still working hard at school but I knew I wanted to do wrestling over what I was doing at school."
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Fight Club Pro, based in Wolverhampton, was where Millie properly honed her craft. And while former PROGRESS world champions Pete Dunne and Travis Banks would beast her and the rest of the class with intense training comprising of 200 squats and 250 crunches, she credits the pair for helping her pick things up so quickly.
"They've helped me out more than I can thank them. Because I trained at a school where the trainer, he's lovely bless him and he helped me out a lot of the time - his style is very outdated and stuff - so when I got to Fight Club it was like starting fresh again.
"They both looked after me so much and told me who to talk to [in order] to get on other shows and who to stay clear of."
It seems like the Midlands is the place to be as far as British wrestling is concerned at the moment, with so many talents emerging from that area - Millie being one of them.
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Asked what's in the water over there, Millie believes it's simply the quality of training.
"The training is so good and you've got the people that train there," she explained.
"We get people in, they've had Sami Callihan in for seminars, Walter, [Jordan] Devlin, obviously Pete [Dunne], Trent [Seven] and Tyler [Bate]. We've had loads of people in and we're so luckily to train in an area where there's so many great talents around.
Typically the journey from independent wrestling to WWE can be a long, arduous one. But WWE's interest in the UK scene led to Millie making her debut with the sports entertainment juggernaut back in June and she hopes it's only the start of things.
"It was surreal because I never even expected to come across WWE for at least ten years. To come into contact with them so early on in my career is was very exciting and I'm excited to see where things with WWE go. I'm still young so hopefully they stay interested and we'll see what happens."
Millie's wrestling ventures do not merely see her go up against fellow females - she is very prominent in intergender wrestling and is all for the sort of exciting dynamic it can create.
"I love it. It's all just wrestling to me really but I do love wrestling the boys, especially when you can do the 'big guy vs small guy' kind of story - you can do that with girls but obviously often when you wrestle a guy they're normally going to be bigger than you.
"Doing that underdog thing where they are being big and strong and you're evading them is really cool. That's my favourite style."
Like her fellow Midlander and British Strong Style product Tyler Bate, it's scary that Millie is this good this young.
She's already a suplex machine who performs the move far better than former WWE and UFC champ Brock Lesnar despite only being 5 ft 6 and just short of 130 lbs.
But even though she's one of the top talents in the UK, Millie still sees plenty of room for improvement.
"I think I need to be more confident because I always get so nervous and worry about things that I shouldn't worry about so I just need to be more relaxed and then I can try different things - things that I try in training I get right but I'll be too scared to do it in a match."
That will happen in time but in the short-term, Millie's focus is the PROGRESS women's championship as she bids to steal the show on the biggest of occasions. Don't be surprised if she does just that.
You can buy tickets for PROGRESS Wrestling Chapter 76, Hello Wembley, here.
Topics:Β WWE News, Wrestling, WWE
