Women of Honor

Last Sunday I wrote about women's wrestling being something wrestling companies should concentrate on in order to attract greater numbers of viewers. During that I touched on the fact that ROH doesn't have a women's division (read about this here). I think that's a mistake on their part. ROH would benefit greatly from the addition of a women's division.

Maria Kanellis has been a heavily featured character for a few years now.  She's over as a heel with existing fans. ODB has recently been brought in as an affiliate of the Briscoes. Maria knocking about made sense. She's married to Michael Bennett and has mostly been presented as a manager. She has a reason to be there.

Top stars of a potential women's division right here.

The same can't be said for ODB. Her previous work has always had her featured as an active wrestler. There's no reason why she'd go to work for a company that doesn't have a women's division for her to compete in. Okay, she initially came in to counteract Maria. That worked but it doesn't explain why she's stuck around.

Announcing the creation of an official women's division would create a reason for ODB to be in ROH and would give Maria more to do (yeah, more than managing the IWGP tag champs). It would allow ROH to get in on the popularity of women's wrestling and it would create roles for new stars in the company. With WWE currently turning NXT into its own indy venture ROH needs all the marketable names it can get.

One of the things in favour of an ROH women's division is that the groundwork is already there. ROH has been promoting "women of honor" matches for years. They've featured SHIMMER heavily in the past. They've just never gone the whole way and created an official women's league in the company. This wouldn't need to be a massive change for ROH. They already have ODB and Maria to play the lead face and heel respectively. Hiring three or four other women would allow them to flesh out the ranks, with other people being brought in less often to work as enhancement or lower card talent.

Taryn has proven herself a good wrestler
 in spite of her WWECW background.

Imagine a Women of Honor division built around women cherry-picked from Shine and SHIMMER, like Jayme Jameson, Su Yung, Athena and Andrea. It would easily better anything TNA are doing with the Knockouts these days (Dollhouse have failed to live up to their potential) and could, with enough time, rival the NXT division. In fact if TNA goes under they could bring in some of the better Knockouts.

This assumes that ROH haven't specifically avoided setting up a women's division for some reason. Perhaps their reasoning is that everyone else is making headway in that area and without as many top names to go around they're best off without something official. That would be understandable but it would also be a shame. The approach ROH booker Delirious has towards storylines is enjoyable and something that's not really used anywhere else in wrestling. I'd like to see it applied to a women's division. And I think other people would too.