The Mae Young Classic was originally going to be a 16 woman tournament

The Mae Young Classic is set to drop its first episodes on the WWE Network next week and that means Triple H is out doing media to promote it. In an interview with NBC Sports, he dropped an interesting tidbit on the tournament, namely that it was originally going to be half as large.

As he put it, it was easier to find cruiserweights for the Cruiserweight Classic because there’s more opportunity for them. That’s not the case for the women, unfortunately, but once they dug in, they found there was more talent than they thought:

“When we first started this process, and I was the one who drove it for years until it finally got the green light, we thought this would be a 16 woman tournament because I thought it would be tough to keep the quality high enough to give the opportunity to women from all around the globe this opportunity.

“But when we started to dig, we started to find all of these diamonds in the rough. It quickly became where we could do a 32-woman tournament and quite honestly I could have done it a little bit bigger than that.

“I’m excited about that. It made the quality [of the tournament] really good and it speaks well to the future because the opportunity is there now and it will just continue to grow.”

If WWE continues to push women on television, the talent pool will only continue to grow as female fans see opportunity that never used to be there.