'Giants or no one else for me': How this WWE dream was born from a girl's love for Big Blue

EAST RUTHERFORD - Danielle Sekelsky has a vision that would bring everything full circle, a realization of her competitive dream as a WWE superstar that was essentially born from her love of the New York Giants.

From helping pack the players' laundry bags in training camp in Albany to hanging out in the locker rooms at the old Giants Stadium and now in MetLife Stadium, where the two-night WWE SummerSlam extravaganza will take place this weekend, this is where her pro wrestling aspirations took root.

At 24, Sekelsky is one of the stars of the "WWE LFG: Legends and Future Greats" reality series on A&E, vying in the second season of the show to earn a promotion from the developmental league to "NXT," one step closer to the biggest wrestling league in the world.

So with SummerSlam happening across the parking lot from the Quest Diagnostics Training Center where camp is ongoing as the Giants prepare for the upcoming season, we wondered if Sekelsky could share what her Super Bowl reality of the wrestling business would be.

"I’ll tell you plain and simple, short-term, I would love to win LFG," Sekelsky told NorthJersey.com and The Record in a recent phone interview. "But long term, I would love the opportunity to main event at MetLife. Growing up there at the Meadowlands, so many memories, so on my WWE bucket list, that's No. 1."

Big Blue devotion runs deep in the family

Mike Sekelsky has spent 25 years working as part of the Giants' equipment staff in training camp and on game days, and the devotion to the franchise runs deep in his family. It's no surprise that fandom trickled down to his daughters, Danielle and her older sister Taylor.

Danielle's paternal grandparents were season ticket holders going back to the early 1950s at the Polo Grounds. They followed the team to Yankee Stadium and then the Yale Bowl before the franchise's big move to the Meadowlands in 1976. Those season tickets were passed on to her dad as the team went from Giants Stadium to MetLife.

She has been fortunate enough to interact with Giants players and coaches of different generations. Photos of Danielle with Eli Manning and Victor Cruz to Jason Pierre-Paul and David Diehl are up all over the Sekelsky home.

Her godfather also has a place in Giants' lore: former safety Myron Guyton, who won Super Bowl XXV with the team.

"My mom's side of the family is from Buffalo, so they have tried to convert me to the Bills for a very long time now," Danielle Sekelsky said with a laugh. "But I grew up in the locker room of old Giants Stadium with my dad, so it's pretty much Giants or no one else for me."

Commitment to becoming a champion

So how does a decorated cheerleading captain who graduated Summa Cum Laude from Penn State with a degree in finance and a minor in economics wind up in the squared circle? Sekelsky's journey to this point started at the age of 7 in a gym near her family's home in Connecticut - a stone's throw from WWE headquarters in Stamford - and she quickly realized her favorite sport of cheering was far more competitive and athletic than pom poms and halftime dance routines.

In high school, Sekelsky wanted to take her skill set as a flyer in cheerleading as far as she could.

"I wanted to be part of a champion," she said, and that goal resulted in a request for her parents.

Danielle found a renowned gym in Freehold, N.J., - World Cup All Star Cheer - and the eager teenager was convinced quickly that this was the place to accomplish her goals.

The biggest challenge was going to be traveling there, especially since Danielle did not have a driver's license yet.

In stepped Mom, and Michelle Sekelsky was behind the wheel for the six-hour-plus treks, three times a week. Danielle would do her homework in the passenger's seat, developing "that champion's mind set."

"Those rides to Freehold were rough," Danielle said. "I would practice with my high school cheer team until about 3 o’clock, then take the 3 1/2-hour drive to Jersey, practice there until around 9:30 and we'd get home after midnight. Then waking up at 6 for school the next morning."

That commitment fueled her desire to feed a competitive edge in addition to playing to her performance side.

"Time management was my best friend," she added. "I knew what we were making that drive for, and especially watching my parents making all these sacrifices, I was definitely going to do everything I could in my power to make it happen. We ended up winning a world championship in my last year, so everything was worth it."

Making the leap to WWE

That led Danielle to Penn State where she became the cheer captain, earning her own share of the athletic spotlight. There, she realized the ultimate thrill performing in front of 110,000 football fans inside Beaver Stadium while future Giants Abdul Carter and Theo Johnson were wowing NFL scouts. She would have loved to cheer for the Giants upon graduation, but since they do not have cheerleaders, her next chapter began in Nashville while spending a year with the Tennessee Titans.

In April 2024, weeks prior to Wrestlemania 40, Danielle got a call from a WWE agent extending an invite to their tryouts that week in Philadelphia. She had been a pro wrestling fan, but never stepped inside a ring until then.

Of 61 tryout participants, men and women combined, Danielle and Chris Island - another participant in both seasons of "WWE LFG" - were chosen. The next week, they were inside the company's Performance Center in Orlando, Fla., beginning their pro wrestling careers.

“Once I got between those ropes, it felt like what I had been doing my entire life,” Danielle said. She is using both "Dani Raye" and "The Shooting Star" as her ring monikers, the latter a shoutout to her team at World Cup All Stars. “It was a new skill set, but it was also performing, and for me, that just felt right. In the snap of a finger, I got in that ring and it just felt like home.”

Lessons learned from wrestling legends

On this season of "WWE LFG," Danielle is coached by WWE Hall of Famer Undertaker, one of the most popular and recognizable wrestlers in the world.

"It’s so fascinating to see the reaction he gets in every room he walks into," she said. "They say as a wrestler, you have to pass the airport test, you want strangers to say, ‘Who is that?’ And when he walks into a room, it’s not, ‘Who is that?’ – it’s that every single person knows who he is."

At 5-foot-3, Danielle is the smallest wrestler at the Performance Center. She has won over Undertaker and the other "WWE LFG" coaches with a determination to prove her worth. She was a semifinalist in Season 1 under former women's champion Mickie James, but now with Undertaker as her coach, Danielle is a legitimate contender as one of the favorites to claim the spot in NXT as the series builds to its finale later this summer.

“That’s the most gratifying thing because people grasp this (business) at different points," Undertaker said on a recent episode of "Six Feet Under," his podcast. "Sometimes you never grasp it. But sometimes it takes people longer for the light to come on. we were filming and I was working with little Dani, and she’s always going to have to fight from underneath. And trying to get her to understand how aggressive and how to bring that out of her, and yesterday I started seeing the stuff that I had been preaching. I saw it applied, and I felt like a proud dad watching my own kids play sports or when they do something. It was like - (claps and pumps his fist), ‘Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about.’"

Danielle believes she can use her size, or lack thereof, to her advantage. She studies pro wrestlers like Rey Mysterio and A.J. Styles, and takes pride in being extremely coachable, soaking in as much as she can from any situation.

"This business is about telling a story," she said. "Undertaker is always saying, the story is what matters. You remember the story and how it made you feel. Something [WWE Hall of Famer] Booker T told us this week, you’ll always remember a face and how that person made you feel. He was telling us about this boy’s face that he made him cry, he had taken something right in front of the boy, and 20 years later, at a meet and greet, he met the kid again – because the kid remembered how Booker made him feel."

As fate would have it, Danielle now yearns to do for WWE fans what the Giants have done for her over the years.

This past April, Danielle had the opportunity to wrestle in front of a crowd outside of the Performance Center for the first time during Wrestlemania week in Las Vegas. A fan recorded the match, and a few weeks later, the video landed in her inbox.

What Danielle saw ultimately rendered her speechless, leaving her in tears.

"The camera pans to a little boy and he’s cheering, “Dani! Dani!” He had to be seven or eight years old," she recalled. "When I was that age, what I went through doubting if I was ever going to be good enough in the cheer world, or have the fight I needed to get to where I wanted to be, just to see a young boy so invested in what I was doing and believing in me and getting back up and fighting back, it meant everything to me and I hope to have a lot more moments like that. My message would be to always fight back, that’s what is just engrained in me."

She paused before adding: "It’s not about the wins. It’s not about the losses. I just want to make people feel something every time I get the chance to perform."

For now, Danielle Sekelsky is motivated to do just that every Sunday night on our screens and TVs.

As for the future, perhaps sooner than even she may anticipate, the stage inside MetLife Stadium like the one set up for WWE SummerSlam could be hers.

Like the gridiron heroes she idolized, this Shooting Star might just be destined to become a Giant of the ring and everywhere else before too long.

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Dani Sekelsky: WWE wrestling dream born from NY Giants love