What is it like for a mom to watch her daughter get hit and slammed in a WWE ring? The mother of Auburn’s Derrian Gobourne explains
A peak inside the WWE journey of former Auburn gymnastics star Derrian Gobourne, who recently wrestled in her first championship match.
She leans on the ropes in the corner of the ring, her feet staggered, her hand at her face seemingly checking for a busted lip or a broken nose. It doesn’t appear that she could even stand on her own, but the match wears on — onlookers watching the battle from the dark corners of the arena, while burning spotlights shine on the ring in the center. Just then, her opponent flies into her with a forearm going into her jaw. Then a kick to her face doubles her over. She’s grabbed by the hair, thrown down into the middle of the ring, then slammed face-first into the mat, writhing as she escapes toward the ropes again.
Such is the life of a pro wrestler.
She gets thrown down, flung around, tangled up, and it’s all part of the job. It’s expected of her. It’s what the crowd came to see. She’s a pro wrestler, a WWE Superstar introduced by her ring name Chantel Monroe, also known as Derrian Gobourne, the standout former Auburn gymnast.
Still, one member of that audience doesn’t just see a wrestler working when she looks in the ring: She sees her baby. Tikisha Gobourne, her mother, has been able to attend most of the shows her daughter has performed on early in her new career. Shortly after finishing her gymnastics career at Auburn in 2023, she was signed by WWE and started training at its Performance Center in Florida, and this past year she’s taken the major step of adopting that ring name and appearing more often on shows meant for widespread audiences as part of WWE’s version of a development league, EVOLVE. She was recently part of the first couple of championship matches of her career, coming up short first in a four-way match for the WWE EVOLVE Women’s Championship that aired in August, then again in a singles match for the same championship that aired in September.
Tikisha has had to watch her daughter take punches and kicks and slams in all those matches, and even though no one usually wants to see their child get beat up, both are taking the bumps like champs:
“I think gymnastics prepared me for anything that she has going on,” Tikisha laughed in a recent interview with the Auburn Torch. “Nothing’s scarier than — You know, I wasn’t even worried when she did, like, beam — She was always comfortable with it, so I was comfortable with it.”
Plus, modern wrestling matches usually aren’t quite as barbaric as the description above may have made it seem. Yes, that sequence did take place, just as described, in a match recently aired on EVOLVE between Monroe and Wendy Choo — but Monroe was “selling,” playing up how badly the blows hurt as part of the pretend. In 2026, everyone is in on the pretend, including the wrestlers, the referee, and, yes, every single fan. The crowd isn’t bloodthirsty: The crowd is in on the fun. Once she got to the ropes, the next sequence in the performance saw Monroe dodge Choo, knee her, and slam her off the ropes to get back on offense. Monroe eventually won the match — all part of the story.
Her family now indoctrinated into the wrestling world, Tikisha knows all of that as well as anyone and she said that, at least so far, she hasn’t been fooled: There hasn’t been a moment yet where as a mother she was worried about whether her daughter actually was injured or was hurting more than she expected to be, or just selling.
“None of that stuff that I see, because she has to sell,” Tikisha said. “Nothing yet has caught me off guard.”
What has surprised her is the structure WWE has in its developmental apparatus, which Monroe is a part of. WWE created a show for its younger, developing talent called NXT in 2010. EVOLVE is a newer endeavor to get even more development talent experience on a show a rung down. In baseball terms, EVOLVE is WWE’s Double-A, while NXT is Triple-A and its major leagues are RAW and SmackDown.
Monroe is making a name for herself in EVOLVE and the next step for her, from the outside looking in, would be to possibly win that EVOLVE championship and almost certainly to move up to NXT. The wins and losses are scripted but the company builds its shows around the wrestlers that the backstage bosses think will sell the most tickets and bring in the most viewers: So being named champion and moving up in the system means her bosses are happy with her, and is a reflection of success even though the wins and losses aren’t coming through sporting competition.
How to watch
New episodes of WWE EVOLVE are posted at 7 p.m. CT Wednesdays on Tubi.
“I grew up watching the older people like Hulk Hogan and Junkyard Dog and all of them … I didn’t know that there were these levels to it. You just see them and it’s just like, OK — You think that they were born doing that,” Tikisha joked. “Me watching the athletes develop, not just her, but watching them develop, it has been mind-boggling — because I’ve seen some of them when they come in and then to see where they are and how hard they work, it’s been great. It’s been a great learning experience for me too.”
Tikisha said her daughter is fitting in and, really, they’ve both been welcomed, as Tikisha flies down from Atlanta to Orlando for EVOLVE and NXT tapings as often as she can: “I’m like the same way with the wrestlers here as I was with the gymnasts there, I’m like a second mom — so when I’m in town everybody comes over and they hang out and they call me, ‘Auntie,’” Tikisha laughed.
And Monroe’s success is evident even on the outside looking in: Her relationship first began with WWE as one of the college athletes WWE signed to a “WWE NIL” deal, which was handed out to a dozen or so NCAA athletes every year since the NIL rule changes, just to get the feet of those athletes in the WWE door. With two championship matches under her belt, only two of her WWE NIL peers have been featured any more prominently than her in WWE programming so far: Grey (real name Peyton Prussin, a former women’s wrestler at Life University) and Oba Femi (Isaac Odugbesan, who threw shot put at Alabama).
There’s a lot more that goes into that transition to the ring, and that assimilation into the entire wrestling world, than people who aren’t fans of pro wrestling may realize. Monroe has been training at the WWE’s Performance Center, working with a coaching staff made up of former wrestlers and long-time WWE agents to show her how to take bumps safely, how to cooperate with an opponent in the ring during a match, how to improvise in front of a live audience, how to walk and talk and act as a character, and much more.
Many of those prospects are getting coached up from the ground up. It’s no secret that there’s often a divide between the talent WWE brings in: On one hand there are the pro wrestling lifers who’ve always dreamed of being pro wrestlers, and started their careers doing smaller, independent shows until they could get noticed that way, or jumped ship from a competitor promotion. On the other hand, there are the former athletes like Monroe, Femi, Grey and many others, which WWE scouted and signed from real sports, knowing that pro wrestling entertainment requires a great deal of athleticism.
Tikisha said Monroe gets along with everyone — “You know Derrian; Derrian’s just nice to everybody and they couldn’t help but love her,” Tikisha said — but that her background does mean she has a lot to learn.
“I grew up watching wrestling. She did not,” Tikisha said. “I remember the first time that they reached out to her, I think it was maybe her senior year at Auburn and she thought (the offer) was fake, so she just ignored it. But then her agent reached out to her and was like, ‘Hey, they’re asking about you being a part of the NIL program.’ And she’s just like, ‘OK, it’s real,’ and she’s one of those people that she feels like, ‘If God brought this to me a second time, it must be for me.’ She’s having to learn a lot, because she doesn’t know a lot of the older wrestlers, and so, when John Cena comes in and she’s sitting there talking to him, she doesn’t even know that it’s John Cena, and she’s having a regular conversation with him, and then when he’s gone they’re like, ‘You know who that was, right?’ And she’s like, ‘No?’” Tikisha laughed.
Before Derrian was a gymnast, she was in cheer, and Tikisha says that she started in gymnastics because her cheer coach told her that her young daughter had already mastered the tumbles and splits and things that came with cheerleading and there wasn’t much of anything left for her to do. In gymnastics, she excelled quickly and even in college it was as a freshman in Auburn that she won a share of the NCAA’s individual national championship on vault.
Tikisha said there’s been moments of frustration for her daughter now, as Monroe, that she’s had to start from scratch again and hasn’t immediately rocketed up to the top of the game. A few months into training with WWE, she also broke her nose, sidelining her for a while. Some of her classmates moved on to a different instructor and she was held back with a new class. But now, Tikisha said they think it was one of the best things that happened to her, and taking that extra time in that class she understands her coaching better than she did before and has since caught up quickly.
“I’ve always been the type of parent that’s just been encouraging and been her sounding board and her biggest cheerleader, so when she had those days — because, I wasn’t a gymnast or a wrestler, so there was nothing that I could do to help,” Tikisha laughed. “All I could do was just sit there and listen or encourage her. But once she got it — because I knew she would; I was like, ‘Once she gets, she’s going to get it’ — So I think she just got to a point where she really started enjoying it more, and once that happened, she was great.”
Her experiences at Auburn were also a big help.
As a gymnast at Auburn, she was known for the showmanship she put into her dazzling floor routines, which often closed home meets in the anchor spot of the final rotation. She often stepped into pressure-packed situations, in front of a packed Neville Arena, and shined in the spotlight to the roar of the crowd.
So while she’s had to learn pro wrestling from scratch, that much she hasn’t had to build from the ground up: Fans in Auburn have seen her showmanship and her performances in the spotlight, and those qualities of hers have fit pro wrestling like a glove.
“Auburn Gymnastics and the whole fanbase has really prepared her for everything that she’s doing now,” Tikisha said. “What she trains, physically, she was prepared for, mentally, she was prepared for. There’s a lot of people that were new that were very intimidated when it came to being in front of a crowd. She was so comfortable. And that’s one of the things that they said to her: They were just like, ‘You are a natural in front of the crowd.’”
Tikisha also said that being a part of press conferences as an SEC athlete helped Derrian feel more comfortable in front of a microphone as she cuts promos as Monroe.
“They will put her on the spot here, and she was ready, because she had done so many interviews there, she was like a natural at it whereas everybody else had to think about it or whatever, they literally put her on the spot and she was ready,” Tikisha said. “So I think her entire experience there, the Auburn Family — she was just ready. It’s almost like being in front of them, but a different fanbase. I mean, the Auburn Family is different because she definitely misses them. And here, she’ll go out there and do her thing and she’ll be like, ‘Well, the crowd was dead,’ but they’re just still learning who she is because she hasn’t debuted on NXT yet.”
Eventually, the hope is for the wrestling fans to get on their feet for Monroe just as they did in Neville Arena when she flew through the final pass of her floor routine.
For now, she’s putting in the same kind of work but making a name for herself again under a new name in a new world.
“She is loving it,” Tikisha said. “I was wondering at first, you know, she did gymnastics for so long and my thing I used to tell her all the time is, ‘Whenever you’re not happy, we’re going to find something else,’” Tikisha said. “I don’t think she loved (wrestling) at first. It was just an opportunity to came to her and she wanted to try it. Now, she loves it.”