Former Shaw Basketball Player Flips Skills And Style Into WWE Career
WWE Superstar Kayden Carter’s long blond locs with colorful rainbow strands intertwined, and her ever-changing neon eye contact lenses draw attention when she enters the wrestling ring.
Although only 5-feet-2, Carter’s charisma, grit, and ingenuity in the ring have earned her a spot on the main WWE Raw roster. In the last few months, Carter has earned a WWE Women’s Tag Team Championship with fellow Superstar Katana Chance and a spot in the Royal Rumble, a WWE marquee pay-per-view event. As a newer member of WWE’s main roster, Carter hopes she will get to compete in WrestleMania, WWE’s biggest event of the year.
Before embarking on a pro wrestling career, Carter, whose birth name is Allyssa “Lacey” Lane, was an accomplished basketball player at Shaw University, a historically Black college in Raleigh, where she also graduated magna cum laude.
Carter, a junior college transfer from Monroe Community College in New York, spent two years at Shaw, from 2010-2012. She was the starting point guard for the Bears and recorded a team-high six steals when the team defeated Ashland University 88-82 to win the NCAA Division II national title in 2012.
“She was always just a go-getter,” said Shaw women’s basketball coach Jacques Curtis. “One of the things that I definitely remember [is] in the national championship game, she turned the ball over, and she saw me getting somebody off that bench to come get her. She went and got that ball back, and she took it back from the girl. So, I left her in the game. That’s her personality – she had no quit.”
Carter finished her collegiate basketball career with two Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association (CIAA) tournament titles, two Elite Eight appearances, two Final Four appearances, and the national title. Though she is now competing professionally in a different sport, Curtis can still see the athleticism in Carter he saw more than a decade ago.
“I think some of the athleticism comes from playing basketball. I think her heart and how hard she goes after it, you can see that anytime she’s wrestling,” Curtis said. “Wrestling to me is showmanship, and she had showmanship when she played basketball. … It fits a personality.
“Lacey always had some tattoos – I think she just got more tattoos now. Lacey always had some type of hairstyle, and so to me, Lacey’s being allowed to be who she is as a woman now. [She’s] flamboyant.”
Carter began her wrestling career in 2016, training at Team 3D Academy of Professional Wrestling, run by WWE Hall of Fame tag team Bubba Ray Dudley and D-Von Dudley. A year later, in 2017, Carter auditioned for the WWE and was offered a development contract, but the offer was pulled after she failed a physical. During the exam, doctors discovered one of her legs had a slight bend and wouldn’t lie flat.
“I didn’t know my leg was not straight,” Carter said. “I played a whole collegiate career with my leg; however, it was, so I never knew [anything] was wrong. I was like, ‘I don’t want this to be over,’ so I found two sports medicine places and said, ‘We need to get my leg straight.’ ”
She spent the next few months in physical therapy to straighten her knee and maintained contact with the WWE. Carter further developed her skills by wrestling in Mexico on the independent circuit, and once she was healthy after physical therapy, she officially re-signed with the WWE in July 2018.
As a member of NXT, WWE’s developmental brand, Carter won the NXT Women’s Tag Team title with Katana Chance, becoming the longest-reigning tag team champion in title history. After earning a spot on the main WWE Raw roster in June 2023, Carter’s high-flying abilities were highlighted in a tag team matchup with Chance against former UFC star and WWE women’s champion Ronda Rousey.
Carter, who is African American and Filipino, has learned to embrace her uniqueness and be unapologetically herself after years of disrespect from people making her feel bad about who she is. She hopes to inspire others to take pride in themselves.
“There’s not a lot of people that look like me,” Carter said. “I have all the odds [against her] being tatted, having dreads, having colorful eyebrows, and being multiracial. Like, there’s a lot of things that I have that is way different than a lot of other people, and I’m really trying to promote that.”
The article first appeared in Andscape