EXCLUSIVE: QT Marshall Discusses His Journey To AEW: “I Created My Own Door”

I recently had the distinct pleasure of speaking with AEW star QT Marshall, who talked with me about a variety of different topics, including how he paved his own way into the promotion by taking a chance on himself and opening his own wrestling school. Highlights, including the full video interview, can be found below.

Takes pride in his position as a coach at the Nightmare Factory:

This is the only thing I’m good at in my life, I believe. So I study it, I really pay attention. And I really tried to break everything down. And, you know, I always thought that, okay, I don’t have a name, at least not compared to the likes of the other people that were in the Atlanta area at the time. And I just said, if I just teach the right way. And then I try to get as many opportunities for these athletes as possible. When we add other things that other schools don’t offer, like my wife’s a nutritionist, so she handles the nutrition aspect, we offer strength and conditioning, just all the stuff that all the tools you would need to become a professional in this industry. I thought that that would really help out and it did, it took off. And of course, AEW and Cody stepping in has really put it over the top. Yeah, we have a lot of athletes there. Every 12 weekswe get another 20 people and then we’re fortunate enough to have the trust of AEW, so anyone that they send us, like Jade, Cargill, or Anthony Ogogo, any of those athletes, you know, we are fortunate enough to train them as well. And we just try to teach the basics. Because once you can learn the basics, you can forget about it. You can go out there and actually wrestle, and we really try to teach that a lot of the athletes that we you know, kind of have a say. Like a lot of athletes that we’ve invested in, let’s put it that way, or ones that you’ve seen on Dark, you know, the Renegade Twins are some of them. We all…we really try to go above and beyond with the female talent to make sure they have a safe place. Because wrestling can be a little weird like that. So just try to let them know that, you know, the sky’s the limit.

How having Cody as a coach helps puts things in perspective for the fresh talent:

And the best part about having Cody there is he’s somebody that has lived it, since he was 18 years old, and he can really explain to them, you know, the idea of this is real, there’s real money to be made, it’s a real job, the wrestling is just a little part of it. So you have to really do well on all aspects of it. So, you know, it’s really cool. It’s really exciting. Even to begin training Hook, right? That’s a huge thing for someone whose dad is a wrestler, you know what I mean? Like, their dad could definitely have trained them, but I think, you know, he saw the value in US training them at least from the start just to kind of break them in a little bit. So, yeah, I mean, it’s really cool to see people succeed, or to get people that have trained elsewhere and then really kind of changed their mindset or just teach them how to be professional and get professional gear and look right and just all the stuff that comes with being a professional in this industry.

Says he created his own opportunity by opening a wrestling school:

I created my own door by moving and opening a school.Sometimes they don’t want to let you sit at the table. You just got to make your own and make it so good that other people want to sit there or they want to take you with them.