How Orlando and the WWE came together to create the future stars of professional wrestling.

Paul Levesque can remember the first time he met Adam Scherr at Full Sail University a handful of years ago. Scherr was a 450-pound ex-football player turned strongman competitor—a huge man with an even bigger personality— and Levesque immediately identified him as having the tools to succeed in the world of professional wrestling. Today, Scherr is better known by his ring persona Braun Strowman and is considered one of the biggest stars in the WWE.

It’s no surprise that Levesque has an eye for wrestling talent; after all, he is a mega star in his own right. Known to fans as Triple H, Levesque is one of the most popular wrestlers to ever step inside a WWE ring. These days, he serves as the company’s executive vice president of talent, live events and creative, working hand-in-hand with boss and wrestling pioneer Vince McMahon— who also happens to be his father-in-law.

And while Levesque’s many accomplishments in the ring gained him notoriety and fame, his biggest victory may be a state-of-the-art training facility located here in Orlando. The WWE Performance Center opened in July 2013 and serves as the training ground for the company’s next generation of talent and it is Levesque’s brainchild. The genesis of the idea came after he saw a desperate need to cultivate and develop a new crop of highly skilled professional wrestlers to carry WWE into the future.

“It was me stepping back and saying if I was a 20-year-old and trying to get into the business, what tools would I give myself to succeed,” he says. “The Performance Center is something you look at and say, ‘That’s awesome.’

“I knew it was going to be big, but Vince said [the opening of the center] was the biggest day for the company outside of it going public. I sort of understood, but now looking back I can see he was right.”

Indeed, it is a site to behold. With seven wrestling rings, a top-notch strength and conditioning room, coaches, trainers, medical professionals and more, the 29,000-square-foot facility offers everything under one roof. At any given time, there are as many as 100 performers fine tuning their craft, some of whom are part of the NXT talent pool. NXT is one of WWE’s global touring brands and each Wednesday night, performers grapple live from Full Sail University and the program airs on USA Network. WWE also partners with the school, offering students hands-on experience in promotion and production and proceeds of ticket sales go toward a scholarship fund.

The up-and-comers in Orlando are often recruited from around the globe and they are comprised of athletes from all walks of life, including football players, rugby stars, competitive body builders and more. Anyone is welcome to apply for the chance to be considered for a three-to-four day tryout, but out of the thousands upon thousands of applicants they receive, most never get the opportunity to flex their muscles and are turned away.

“There’s a process, we recruit heavily in markets all around the globe,” Levesque says. “In football, the NFL cuts 500 players a year. [These athletes] are leaving the NFL and their dream is going away. They’ll say, ‘I played football because I was good at it at a young age, but if you told me I could have been a pro wrestler, I would’ve done it.’”

Levesque says the ideal candidates are people with charisma and emergent leaders. And, they have to be comfortable with relocating to Orlando; a move that doesn’t take much convincing.

“People say, ‘Why don’t you have the center in Stamford, [Connecticut, where the WWE’s corporate offices are located]? It’s harder to convince people to come to Stamford; it snows a lot. It’s not the place you want to be,” Levesque quips. “I knew we needed an easy in and out corridor for flying. You needed a place that if you were anywhere in the globe, recruiting in a smaller village in India and said, ‘Do you want to go to Orlando?’ they know it. It’s a globally recognized city that has everything you could want. It’s a wonderful place to live and so it was not hard to convince people [to come here].”

Recruits who arrive expecting to pump iron and body slam each other all day would be considered foolish. There’s a lot more than just the physical aspect that goes into the training, with character development playing a major role in the success of any potential budding star.

“You look for people with big personalities that can take direction. The athletic part is the easiest part almost. It’s the other stuff; it’s hard to teach charisma, how to teach people to act confidently and have swagger. Those things take longer,” says Levesque.

The Performance Center has acting and improv coaches on site to help performers establish their personalities and on-camera presence. And given that English is not a first language for many recruits, they also offer language arts instruction. In addition, they teach life skills including how to manage your finances, how to shoot and edit your own content, brand marketing and media training.

“We want to have the most well-rounded and experienced performer on every level that we can,” Levesque says.

Part of that lends itself to WWE’s dedicated efforts to give back to the local community. With a base of 100 athletes in Orlando at any given time, those at the Performance Center routinely participate in area events such as the plane pull competition at Orlando International Airport or bringing Special Olympics athletes to the facility to train alongside them.

“I love it. It’s one of the great things we do as WWE superstars,” Levesque offers. “None of our performers are contractually obligated to do the community stuff they do. They do it because they want to and that’s a cool thing. There’s an awesome opportunity to do something more, something that kids and people look up to. You can really impact change.”

Every recruit’s training process differs, with some picking up things extremely quickly while others require years honing their craft. In addition to Strowman, one of the biggest stars to come out of the facility is Alexis Kaufman. Better known as Alexa Bliss, she is one of the most highly touted success stories, especially given the fact that she had never wrestled prior to her arrival in Orlando.

“[Alexa] never stepped inside a ring, she had a gymnastics background, and now she’s one of our top female stars. Without this experience, she wouldn’t have been anywhere near this business,” Levesque says.

And it’s not just the next wave of WWE stars taking full advantage of the facility. Several established stars train and rehab in Orlando because of the amenities offered, and sometimes they see added benefits.

Such was the case with superstar John Cena, the latest WWE star to transition to Hollywood star. A few years ago, Cena took advantage of the language arts program at the center. Seeing a growing market in China, he expressed a desire to learn Mandarin and last year he spent time in the country working on a movie with action star Jackie Chan.

“You see it more and more now,” Levesque says. “The talent can live wherever they want. They leave here, go back home and I’ll get a call saying, ‘I’m thinking of moving back to Orlando, is it cool if I come back to the Performance Center while I’m there?’

“We have every bit of physical therapy and recovery tools they need here. The trainers, the docs are here. A whole strength and conditioning team is writing programs and evaluating you. The ability to do that in an environment—you are not going to Gold’s Gym and having people come up to you for an autograph. You can come here and be you and be around people in your environment. If I was a talent today, there’s no way—even if I lived somewhere else—that I wouldn’t have a [home] in Orlando, because of this place. It offers too much to not be here on a regular basis.”

This article originally appeared in Orlando Family Magazine’s December 2019 issue.