Vaughan Hyde is chasing two dreams.
The 28-year-old Catawissa woman is refining her skills as a professional wrestler while pursuing a degree in nursing.
Hyde, who wrestles under the ring name Mz. Hyde, will demonstrate her grappling skills Saturday during an American Championship Wrestling card at the De Soto Knights of Columbus, 13225 Hwy. E. Doors will open at 5 p.m. with the first match scheduled to start at 6 p.m.
Tickets for the show cost $5.
Hyde said she knows wrestling and nursing are vastly different pursuits.
“I always say I want to kill them in the ring and then save their life,” said Hyde, whose father, Patrick Jones, also is a wrestler and owns ACW after starting the promotion five years ago with former wrestler Mark Morton.
Hyde is scheduled to square off against a wrestler named BB Ryan at the De Soto show, entering the bout as the ACW ladies champion. It will be the second time for the two women to meet in the ring.
“She is a great athlete,” Hyde said of Ryan. “She has a lot of power behind her. She can pick me up and throw me around a bit. I can come from below or the top. I think it will be an interesting watch.”
The Jan. 15 card is expected to feature seven matches. Headlining the card will be a match for the tag-team title between champions KGB and the Lumberjacks and a world-title match between champion Playboy Double H and Zero Hype Guy Smith.
Breaking in
Hyde said she did not grow up a wrestling fan, even though she often went to shows when her father performed and met some famous wrestlers, like Dan Severn and Randy Orton.
Because of her father’s connections, though, Hyde ended up drawn into wrestling.
Mark Morton, who died in 2021, was close friends with Jones and Glenn Jacobs, another former wrestler well known as Kane in the World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) circuit.
Jacobs, who’s also the mayor of Knox County, Tenn., operates a wrestling school called Jacobs-Prichard Wrestling Academy in Knoxville, Tenn., with former WWE wrestler Tom Prichard. Jacobs reached out to Morton to see if he would be interested in starting a promotion so the school’s students would have a place to perform.
“Mark came to me and said you have the ring and the know-how, and that is how I started,” said Jones, whose in-ring career wound down over the past five years as he has operated ACW. “Mark died of brain cancer five months ago. He was a major part of ACW, and that is one of the reasons why we have kept going. Without Mark, it has been rough, but as long as you do good things, it will be good.”
Hyde said in 2019 she was invited to train at the Jacobs-Prichard Wrestling Academy (JPWA). She already had started training with her father, who operates a training school in Catawissa called the Skull Canyon Dojo.
“Mark called me and said they need girls down at the training center at JPWA,” Hyde said. “I was like, ‘Move to Knoxville, Tenn., for three months? OK, let’s go.’”
Hyde also is studying nursing at St. Louis Community College-Wildwood and plans to go to Chamberlain University College of Nursing in Maryland Heights after graduation.
Hyde said she also works for the Meramec Valley R-3 School District in its before-and-after school programs.
“I stay very busy,” she said. “I want to take wrestling as far as I can. With nursing, I want to take that as far as I can as well.”
Hyde’s plans
Hyde said Prichard told her it was best to wrestle for at least five years before trying to work at a major promotion, and she agreed she didn’t want to be part of a national promotion until she felt ready.
“When I hit that five-year mark, I plan on reaching out and hitting it hard,” Hyde said. “That is coming up soon.”
She also wants to help break the stereotype of women’s wrestling.
In the past, wrestlers were treated as a novelty and even a joke by wrestling promotions. There also was a time when women wrestlers were highlighted for sex appeal over athletic ability.
That has slowly changed, she said, as WWE and newer promotion All-Elite Wrestling have focused more on the athletic abilities of woman wrestlers.
“There is still so much that can change,” Hyde said. “There is so much I can do to make it change. When I am in there I am actually wrestling, I am trying to win. I am not trying to be sexy. It is more I am going to win and show I can hold my own.”
Coming home
While his daughter is looking to the future, Jones said bringing ACW to De Soto is a step back into the past since he lived in the area when he was a child.
He said his family moved to Olympian Village when he was 3 or 4, and he attended Athena Elementary School through fifth grade, and then his family moved out of the area.
“I never had dreams I would go tour the world and do the things I have done coming from there,” Jones said. “Now, I go back and see how De Soto has been built up and how nice it is. It will be really cool to be back in my old stomping grounds.”