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Pro wrestling champion Steph De Lander may have said it best as several WWE wrestlers departed the company last week.
“Getting released from WWE was the best thing that happened to my career,” she wrote on X. “It doesn’t have to be the end of the story!”
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Australian wrestler Steph De Lander poses before a match against Malaysian wrestler Nor Phoenix Diana in Puchong, Selangor, on Dec. 11, 2022. The match was organized by APAC Wrestling. (Arif Kartono/AFP)
De Lander has lived it. The Australian native emerged as a star for Total Nonstop Action Wrestling (TNA) following her WWE departure in 2022 – where she won the TNA Digital Media Championship and had significant feuds with Matt Cardona and Sami Callihan.
Though she spent the last two years recovering from a serious neck injury, De Lander made her in-ring return last month at Awesome Championship Wrestling (ACW) where she defeated Indi Hartwell and J-Rod for the women’s championship.
She shared some advice for the recent WWE departures in an interview with Fox News Digital.
Steph De Lander returned to the ring at an Awesome Championship Wrestling event in March 2026. (Jay Adam Photography)
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“It’s such a different journey for everyone and you need to kind of go with the process of how it hits you because for some people it’s their ultimate dreams, for some people they were ready to leave, for some people, they were there for one year, they were there for 10 years,” she said. “It’s so personal. It’s so unique. But my advice would be like deal with the emotions and the feelings in the way that you need to but then if you want to continue with wrestling as a career, once you’ve processed it or at least have gotten to a point where you can continue working, that’s when you need to hit the ground running and go balls to the wall.
“Now you have an opportunity to re-write your legacy. You have an opportunity to change the perspective of what people think about you and how they view you. And when you’re at WWE, you have no control over the way you’re presented. When you’re on the indies, you have all of the control. That would be my biggest advice. You have so much more control over your career and your life than you think you do now. It’s gonna be hard, it’s gonna suck. The money is not going to match what it did in WWE. But if you commit to it, and you put your head down and you grind, there’s so many more opportunities out there outside of the WWE bubble.”
De Lander has made a name for herself outside of WWE.
Steph De Lander makes her way to the ring at an Awesome Championship Wrestling event. (Jay Adam Photography)
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She will make her next appearance for ACW on May 16 at the MJN Convention Center in Poughkeepsie, New York.
Ryan Gaydos is a senior editor for Fox News Digital.
