Bayley made her pro wrestling debut on the indies in 2008, which led to her signing to WWE and debuting in NXT in 2012. A naive underdog, Bayley quickly won over fans and ended up becoming one of the most popular characters on the show, forging a classic rivalry with Sasha Banks on her quest for the NXT Women’s Championship.
Bayley moved up to the WWE main roster in 2016 and has evolved a bit during her time there, going from an underdog on the big stage to a tag team specialist to a surprising heel turn. She has kind of excelled at every turn.
7 Counseling With Sasha Banks
The low point of Bayley’s main roster run just might be her weird back-and-forth betrayal and bickering with Sasha Banks in 2018. Rivals turned friends, the two ended up repeatedly backstabbing one another on WWE television until the situation finally boiled over in June of the year, when Bayley finally lost her cool and attacked Sasha.
This resulted in Raw GM Kurt Angle ordering the two to undergo counseling, resulting in such a rehash of the Kane and Daniel Bryan anger management skits that Dr. Shelby made a return to the proceedings. This would eventually lead to the duo forming a tag team and becoming the inaugural WWE Women’s Tag Team Champions.
6 Davina Rose
Before Bayley made an impression on NXT, she worked under the ring name of Davina Rose for California promotions like Big Time Wrestling and Championship From Hollywood. During this period, she’d share a ring with Awesome Kong, Allison Danger, Sara Del Rey, and Candice LeRae, among others.
By 2011, Davina Rose would debut for SHIMMER Women Athletes, where she’d cross paths with noted stars like Mia Yim, Mercedes Martinez, Saraya Knight, and Cherry Bomb (now known as Allie). She quickly gained the attention of WWE and signed to the promotion in 2012, so she hadn’t quite worked her way into the SHIMMER Championship scene or anything.
5 Raw Singles Run
Bayley made her main roster debut at Battleground in 2016, making a surprise appearance as Sasha Banks’ partner in a tag team match. From there, oftentimes it felt like WWE management was overlooking Bayley and wasting the performer’s potential, especially given how easy it was for fans to get behind her on NXT.
For many fans, it was hard to get into main roster Bayley as she spent months feuding with Dana Brooke and took part in one of Raw’s most reviled segments, “Bayley, This Is Your Life.” Despite those lowlights, it felt vindicating to see Bayley accomplish things like beating Charlotte Flair for the Raw Women’s Championship.
4 NXT Rookie
The most endearing era of Bayley has to be her early days in NXT, where she was brand new to the show and acted like an excited fangirl who compulsively hugged everyone. It can be a tough character to portray because it’s really easy to fall into the trap of coming off as a simpleton or overgrown child, but Bayley did an amazing job walking the line between naivety and stupidity.
On top of that, it was great for NXT fans at the time to see Bayley grow and improve as both a wrestler and as a character. That character growth was crucial to Bayley’s rise through NXT.
3 Role Model
In 2019, Bayley won the women’s Money in the Bank ladder match and ended up cashing in her championship opportunity on Charlotte Flair later in the evening. A few months later, Bayley suddenly turned heel, attacking Becky Lynch alongside on-again-off-again friend and rival Sasha Banks. Soon enough, Bayley debuted a new look, getting rid of pretty much every visual aspect of her years-long babyface run.
While it seemed like an odd idea on paper to turn WWE’s purest babyface into a heel, it ultimately worked out thanks to Bayley’s performance. Aided and abetted by Sasha Banks, Bayley did an incredible job playing the delusional, overconfident heel who still considered herself a “role model” despite acting despicably. It was during this run that Bayley and Banks ended up holding all of the main roster women’s titles -- the Raw, SmackDown, and Women’s Tag Team Championships -- at the same time.
2 NXT Underdog
Once Bayley was an established character, she found herself betrayed by Charlotte Flair, who sided with the BFFs (Summer Rae and Sasha Banks), perfectly establishing her as an underdog in the face of the top heels of the division. From there, Bayley had to work to get into the Women’s Title picture, getting knocked out of title tournaments and losing #1 Contender’s bouts until she finally had a couple of unsuccessful challenges to Charlotte Flair’s Women’s Championship.
But when Sasha Banks became the champ, a real rivalry between the two ensued, culminating with the intense and emotional title win for Bayley at 2015’s NXT TakeOver: Brooklyn and the subsequent Iron Man match classic at TakeOver: Respect.
1 NXT Champion
Sometimes, when a babyface -- especially an underdog babyface -- wins the top title they’ve been chasing for so long, it leads to a lackluster or brief title run. Just look at Sami Zayn and Johnny Gargano in NXT, or Kofi Kingston and Daniel Bryan on the main roster for examples. But Bayley ended up having one of the best babyface title runs in the history of the company during her 223-day stint as champion.
It’s all thanks to storytelling. After beating her rival to win the title, Bayley then had to struggle to keep the championship against legitimate threats like a monster heel in the form of Nia Jax and Eva Marie, a “WWE Diva” from a reality show that appeared to have WWE management behind her. Ultimately, she’d lose the title to Asuka in a great match at NXT TakeOver: Dallas.