Ranking WWE's First Ever NXT Class - From Worst To Best
How many managed to make it beyond the Performance Center? And just how far did they go?
Full disclosure before we get started - this class doesn't include a great deal of women from the 2012 FCW/NXT changeover.
That's not to say there weren't some megastars-in-waiting in the system by then, but you weren't encouraged to care about them and quality had to rise up from the smallest of quantities.
John Laurinaitis' Florida Championship Wrestling didn't put a lot of stock in the future of women's wrestling. Some would argue it didn't put that much in the future of the men either, but at least some of the performers below weren't reduced to bikini contests and dance-offs on the barely-attended house shows. They got their own roster page as "Superstars", in contrast to the marginalised "Divas" that just happened to include the likes of Paige, Bayley, Sasha Banks and other future Hall-Of-Famers.
It was a disaster of a time. Enough so that Triple H's overhaul was desperately needed when it finally took place. The period between the two systems was a sticky one though, with many of the talents not making out of the Orlando gym before getting out of wrestling altogether. The same applies with every new class, so consider this list not so much a retrospective, but a realisation of what to expect in the near future...
Article originally published March 2021. Revised and republished March 2024.
54. Anya
Boasting one of the smallest Cagematch records on this list (and indeed all of Cagematch) Anya never made it to screen following just five matches under the NXT umbrella on the fabled Largo Loop Floridian house show circuit.
Like several on this list, she bizarrely even didn't have to do business on the way out. In a collector's item for the ages for those that are fans of any of the four, she teamed with Yoshi Tatsu (!) to defeat Angelo Dawkins (!!) and Charlotte Flair (!!!) in her farewell bout. As evidence of the moving parts still occurring during the transition between Florida Championship Wrestling and NXT, this even took place in the "FCW Arena" facility.
Outside of that oddity, she worked with several wrestlers that either went on to much bigger things. And some that...didn't. Including...