Renee Young Reveals Original WWE Name Pitched To Her

WWE personality Renee Young was recently a guest on former Tag Team Champions Edge and Christian’s podcast, E&C’s Pod Of Awesomeness, to talk about several professional wrestling topics. Young discussed being a pro wrestling fan as a child but losing interest as she got older:

“So I was [a pro wrestling fan growing up]. I was when I was younger, when I was a kid, but I had fallen out from watching it. I mean, I was always playing a bunch of sports growing up. I was always a busy kid doing stuff, so I did fall out from watching it. But yeah, once I kind of resubmerged myself in it, I got back in it seeing who was still around, what was going on, what the storylines were, and everything.” Young added.

“I knew enough about it, but I didn’t know everything about it. I wasn’t like the voice of wrestling by any stretch at that point, so yeah, I had to figure some stuff out.”

Young also admitted that she had some initial reservations about leaving her Canadian TV gig with The Score Television Network in Canada, however, she knew she wanted her next step to be in the U.S. She had several offers from other outlets, including a great audition with ESPN:

“Yeah, I definitely did – I certainly had some reservations in the sense that I was winding down at The Score no matter what, so I was looking for my next step. And I knew that I wanted my next step to be in the U.S.

“And I did, at the time, have a couple of different offers on the table or a lot of different career path opportunities.” Young recalled, “but the week of my audition at WWE, I think it was later in the week or maybe it was a Monday to a Monday kind of situation, but the week prior, I had gone to ESPN because they were really heavily considering bringing me in to take over SportsNation when Michelle Beadle first left.

“Yeah, so I was down there, went in, had a great audition, like, you know when you have a s–t audition, but this was like a good audition, everyone was giving me high-fives.”

She then got an audition with WWE, which she believes didn’t go great, but ended up being offered the job:

“The next week, my agent was like, ‘hey, WWE wants to bring you in.’ I was like, ‘okay, cool,’ went down, had, like, not a great audition with WWE by any stretch,” Young acknowledged. “I went for my audition, went and did commentary with [an unnamed former WWE commentator], which was brutal, brutalious, it was quite heinous.

“And I was like, ‘wait, what am I doing? What?’ And it was just a feeling of a lot of pressure figuring out what doing commentary does, which I still haven’t figured out, and they gave me a battery and they were like, ‘sell this to me.’ They put me through the gauntlet, so I wasn’t sure what was going to happen. Lo and behold, here I am and I got the job, you guys.”

When she joined WWE initially, the company pitched Renee (real name Renee Paquette) the name “Renee Sterling” for her WWE name. This caused some tension for Young, as she had already established herself with the Paquette name on TV and didn’t realize a name change was required:

“When I got the job, it was still a weeks weeks after that and I was going back and forth from like Stamford [Connecticut] to Toronto, and figuring out my visa, blah, blah, blah, whatever.” Young remembered, “and I got an email with my new name change, which was Renee Sterling and I was so stressed out about this.

“Yeah, it was Renee Sterling. I didn’t know that my name was going to change and that kind of threw me for a loop because, as [Edge and Christian] said, I was working in Canada before and had been on TV before, so I felt very odd about changing my name. And then, they let me give a few other name options and I ended up with Young.”

Young said that nowadays ring names likely aren’t required for WWE commentators anymore:

“Yeah, it’s super odd and, like, I do get it in the way of like, it’s different now. A lot of people got to keep their name.” Young explained, “we’ve hired a few other people that are down in NXT now and they’ve all got to keep their name, so it seems like that may be dying off, but I felt like that kind of put me into the machine of WWE for all rights and whatnot for them to just own the name.

“But yeah, that was the biggest thing I had reservations about. I just felt like I didn’t know that was going to be part of the deal and it threw me for a loop. And it was not met with good reception when I didn’t want to change my name, but that was somebody else who also doesn’t work here.”