Jessica Troy had big shoes to fill when seasoned veteran Kellyanne announced she’d be stepping away from pro wrestling in November 2021.
In the wake of her retirement, Kellyanne also relinquished the Melbourne City Wrestling Women’s Championship. With the title’s subsequent vacation, MCW rallied a Ballroom Blitz match together the following month. Joining forces with Pro Wrestling Australia (PWA), the two companies hosted MCW x PWA Black Label: Worlds Collide. There, eight of Australia’s top stars fought to claim the honor as the new champion.
Jessica Troy would outlast her fierce competitors to win the MCW Women’s Championship, but the absence of Kellyanne was glaring. “Everyone in Australia should be lucky that we had Kellyanne here for how long she was wrestling for,” Troy told WrestleZone. “She was just such an intense and impactful wrestler. She would really just lay it in and leave it all in the ring, especially when we had matches because we would wrestle — I think we wrestled almost all over Australia— everyone wanted to have that match [with her] in every state almost. Every time I came out of a match [with Kellyanne], I feel like I learnt something or we just really beat each other up and put on a good show. So, I think everyone should be thankful that she was here and take from her intensity almost.”
“The Arm Collector” added that Kellyanne’s hard-hitting mentality encouraged her to step up her own game. “She’s just so intense and hard hitting in the ring that to have a good match with her, you have to think in your own head, ‘I have to keep up with this. I have to make sure I’m looking as strong, as intense as she is’. So, she will bring that out of everyone that she wrestles, I believe.”
In clinching the MCW Women’s Championship, though, Troy admitted some pressure arose. “Taking over from Kellyanne’s title reign, she was my vet. Then [to] all the people I wrestled, I was their vet. So, I was taking over that role almost exactly. I’m not really used to being that position, but I thought I did a good job. I was happy to kind of explore not so much being the underdog anymore, but actually the person in control and the one that looks like, ‘Oh, she’s going to win because she has the armbar. She has the experience.’ It was a nice new role for me to play and I hope the other people I wrestled took something away from it as well.”
Jessica Troy kept a strong hold on the title for nearly a year — finally unseated by DELTA on November 26 in a grueling 30-minute Iron Woman match.
