Bayley Expresses What Damage CTRL Means To Her
Bayley has opened up about the group that she created called Damage CTRL and how far they have come in WWE.
At WWE SummerSlam 2022, Bayley returned after being off for a full year due to a major knee injury. Bayley didn’t come alone because she was joined by IYO SKY, who is the current WWE Women’s Champion, and Dakota Kai.
In November 2023 before Survivor Series, Damage CTRL officially added former WWE Women’s Champion Asuka and former Women’s Tag Team Champion Kairi Sane.
While there are certainly teases that Bayley might be kicked out of the group by the other women, she is still with them and she still believes in what the group stands for. The five women are regularly featured on Smackdown with Sky as the WWE Women’s Champion and Asuka & Kairi Sane getting a Women’s Tag Team Title match on the January 26th edition of Smackdown.
During an interview with Under The Ring, Bayley spoke about Damage CTRL and why she’s grateful that the group exists.
“I mean, I love it. I don’t just like it. I love it. I was actually thinking about this a few days ago that I was gonna make this big old sappy post about it, but I’ll just share it here. I just think it’s insane the group of women that I have in this group, in this faction.”
“It started out with IYO and Dakota, obviously, and it’s two women that you didn’t get to see on the main shows. They’ve already shown that they can do it, especially IYO being the champion right now. I just thought about meeting Asuka for the first time. I met her back in Shimmer in 2010 or 2011. I saw her wrestle Sara Del Rey and I was like, ‘Oh, my God. Who is this?’ I wasn’t keeping up with Japanese women’s wrestling at the time. To now have her by my side is incredible. She’s one of my favorite opponents. She’s just one of the most influential women, I think, in wrestling.”
“Then Kairi is somebody that is untouchable and very unpredictable and so unique in her own way. To have her and be able to kind of watch her like a fly on the wall, see her do her thing, and see where she fits in with all of us has been, just, I feel so grateful.”
Bayley Says Damage CTRL Is A Dream Come True
As she continued, Bayley talked about how Damage CTRL’s existence leads to more women on WWE programming and that’s a dream come true for her.
“For the longest time, you would only see one or two girls on the show, if that. We’d be lucky to get a women’s match. We’d be lucky to get more than five minutes on the show.”
“Now the cool thing about having an all women’s faction is that we don’t all have to have a match. You saw IYO versus Michin, for example, the first show of the year, and we didn’t all have a match, but we were all there. We all appeared. So automatically you get five women on the show whereas you would just have two women otherwise.”
“I think that’s more empowering and it’s more something for the NXT girls at least to look up to and it’s something that I have always dreamed about, to have an all women’s faction, you know, like a big one like this. I was happy with the three of us, but to have four or more was my ultimate goal. So this has been just a dream come true.”
Elsewhere in the same interview, Bayley praised Michael Cole, who she has had an on-screen rivalry with for several years.