Select Answers: Tryouts, Promos (Patreon)

Welcome to Select Answers, a feature that provides some of the answers to questions that were posed to Sean Ross Sapp in the most recent Fightful Weekly Q&A Podcast. The show drops every week on Fightful Select for subscribers.

When aggregating these posts please refer to it as "Fightful Select Answers Q&A" and tag Fightful, noting that it was in the Q&A format to avoid confusion.

***

How much jockeying goes on behind the scenes in WWE when it's tryout season? Do you know if those with their own schools/promotions (Cody, Booker T, etc.) or people who run their own camps (like Bayley's Lodestone Challenge) are active in the ears of the scouting/recruitment teams trying to get their guys and gals invitations?

From what I understand, Gabe Sapolsky is the one who primarily scouts and wrangles talent, and he's very busy traveling around to see performers. There are a lot of them that get advice about coming in, what they need to work on and the like. There are definitely people who put in good words for tryouts.

Still the same question, have you heard anything about East Asia Tryout in WWE?

Not a peep. I would imagine that if they have one, it'll be during their next trip overseas, but I've not heard anything resembling an expansion now.

So we know promos are scripted. So how much input do the performers get vs the writers?

There's still plenty of corresponding with the talent and writers. Very rarely is something unscripted. We've even speculated that some are unscripted on our shows, only for someone to drop an actual verbatim script sheet as it appeared. Writers often work directly with the talent and take feedback.