• Slug: Sports-Phoenix Championship Wrestling,  1,500 words.
• 4 photos available (thumbnails, captions below).

By Dylan Slager
Cronkite News

PHOENIX – Dom Vitalli, a professional wrestler and business guru who started working in the industry in New York in 2001, moved to Arizona in 2009 and had nearly reached a dead end in his search to find established wrestling schools in the Valley before joining a local venue as a volunteer trainer.

“One random Thursday night, I went to go train myself. I asked, ‘Hey guys, so who is the trainer?’ And they said, ‘Oh well we don’t have a trainer on Thursday nights, we just kind of do what we want,’” Vitalli recalled. “From my background, that is completely unacceptable. It’s like letting kids loose in a candy store. Someone is going to get hurt.”

Vitalli’s desire for wrestling and making other wrestlers better led him to meet his future partner in the business, Jon Wolfgang. In 2016, while attending college, Wolfgang chose to pursue his passion for wrestling and move back to Arizona, where he also noticed a lack of developmental resources for professional wrestling.

He discovered Vitalli through a podcast that Vitalli ran about the wrestling business. From there, Wolfgang began training with him on his Thursday sessions and their partnership continued to grow.

“If you’re going to dedicate yourself to something as hard as wrestling is, from my perspective, there needs to be structure. There needs to be a plan and at that time, there just wasn’t,” Wolfgang said about the state of wrestling in the Valley at the time.

After a few years of training together and working with partner organizations, the plan to improve the training conditions for wrestling in Arizona began to take shape. Vitalli and Wolfgang had been doing work with Pacific Coast Wrestling Ultra in California and planned two shows in Arizona. The idea would be to bring the hype behind the Ultra shows to the Valley, but unfortunately, the shows did not work out.

With two shows capping out at around 100-150 attendants, Vitalli and Wolfgang returned to the drawing board to think bigger, while assessing what went wrong and where they could make their mark. The duo crafted a plan that would change the landscape of the Arizona wrestling scene forever.

After researching, Wolfgang recognized an opportunity to open a school, TrainInAZ, where devoted wrestlers of all skill levels could learn from each other to become great.

“We put together a business plan. How much money we would need to start it, how the liabilities as far as the insurance, the business registration and licensing,” Wolfgang said “What type of equipment we need to have, you know, we didn’t necessarily have a ring at that time, but we had a gentleman who would let us rent a ring to put in there. How we would protect people if they were to fall on the outside, getting floor mats all covered on the outside … Dom and I put it together, it took us about a year of just putting the background together for the training center and then we found a spot in Mesa that we’re still currently at.”

With a location scoped out, Vitalli and Wolfgang just needed one last important piece: students. They began advertising for TrainInAZ and hosting interviews for potential students at a local coffee shop.

“We’d have questionnaires and it’s the same thing that we do today,” Wolfgang said. “We don’t just let anyone in our training center. We go and sit down with them and we ask them, ‘Who are you? What’s your background? How was your athleticism? Have you ever done anything athletic? Have you ever done anything in front of people?’”

“We’re very thorough in that process and it’s not so much to weed people out. It’s to just give them a very realistic expectation of what it takes to do this at an extremely high level,” Vitalli added. “And we’re preparing them for the highest level and if they can’t do that here, they’re never going to do that there.”

The viewpoint of wrestling to the general public, especially in Arizona, has not been the greatest with social media promoting flashy wrestling that can seem fun. However, all that does is take away the true impact of wrestling.

The true passion these men show for the business they love drives them to help others. They have seen the sport’s impact on people and strive to make it better.

“Wrestling will eat you up, fist over barrel, if you try and get in this without a solid foundation in education, in your mental health,” Wolfgang said. “We often say to our students and to each other, ‘It’s bigger than wrestling.’ The whole point of this whole industry is to inspire people to live better lives. So if we just take people’s money and just bring them in just to make an extra $150, why? We’re not helping them.”

With the school up and running, Vitalli and Wolfgang scrapped the idea of running shows and focused on training their wrestlers. When they felt they were ready to compete, they would outsource them to other companies to give them audience exposure and allow them to gain experience in the ring. This process went on for a good few months and the progress that their students made inspired the idea of potentially creating something new.

Their process was fueled by the one thing they knew they had over everyone else: infrastructure.

They knew the foundation they had built their ideas on could have a lasting impact.
But Vitalli and Wolfgang wanted to create a special environment – something people could immediately connect with and support. They chose to focus on the students they had rather than outsource a wrestler who would cost more than they would draw. Vitalli and Wolfgang wanted to focus on the ones who cared just as much to be there as they did.

“Let’s make it grassroots. Our guys. Our girls. The sweat off their backs. Let’s build this from the ground up with them. And let’s see what happens,” Vitalli said about his approach.

That’s exactly what they did. Their first show was held at Revelry, a local entertainment venue in Mesa. To their surprise, the event was a massive success, in part because fans knew the wrestlers and drew a larger crowd.

Vitalli and Wolfgang’s vision of bringing respect back to wrestling was finally becoming a reality. By using the homegrown talent and the support that followed them, Phoenix Championship Wrestling would run a show every two months to not oversaturate the market and keep interest high.

Soon PCWAZ became the fastest-growing wrestling promotion in the state, and Vitalli and Wolfgang began executing a smaller project they had in mind by the name Slam U – a place where students could not only run the ropes but the show as well.

The idea behind bringing back Slam U was to give the students of TrainInAZ the responsibility of making the show a success with the oversight of trainers. However, the match card, the venue, the charities and every other aspect of the shows was given to the students. It provided crowd exposure to the newer students and allowed for the more experienced students to see a side of the business they wouldn’t normally see.

The rapid rise of Slam U led Wolfgang and Vitalli to contact the Mesa Unified District, which approved them to host a charity show at Holmes Elementary School. With an attendance of over 300 kids and parents, the event fundraised money for the school and created connections for Slam U and PCWAZ.

With the Holmes Elementary show generating a buzz, Slam U held charity shows all around Arizona. PCWAZ stars also gained more exposure as wrestlers began going to schools to do activities and host panels for the kids. And the community responded with overwhelming support.

As the company continues to thrive, it looks to keep producing the top talent in Arizona. The students, in every aspect of the school, show the passion and determination to be successful.

“It’s a testament to the guys just putting their heads down and saying, ‘We want this. We want to be the best thing out here. We want to be the only thing that comes to people’s mind in Arizona where they think wrestling,’” Vitalli said.

And they continue to do that. PCWAZ runs shows every other month with TrainInAZ products Grizz Brody, Kevin Koa, Zamaya and many more leading the charge. The most recent show on May 18 broke attendance records for the company. However, those records could be broken during their next show on July 13, with the floor seats already sold out.

PCWAZ, Slam U and TrainInAZ have reached heights that seemed unattainable. However, the love that Vitalli, Wolfgang and every wrestler has for this sport drives them to be the “hottest ticket in town.”

“Wrestling is a catalyst for developing inspiration in the hearts of our young men and young women,” Wolfgang said. “There is a natural love for the product that we put out that sells itself and that love of wrestling starts at the base level: in the hearts of each one of our students.”

For more stories from Cronkite News, visit cronkitenews.azpbs.org.