ORLANDO, Fla. — The Orlando area is a hotbed for wrestling. Many of the greats come through the city to train and compete. A young child can easily see the example of the theatrics that come with WWE and become entranced by it.
That's exactly what happened for Winter Springs' Izzy Silagyi, now known as Izzy Moreno, working toward her own wrestling dreams.
Izzy has spent the last eight years committed to her craft, leading up to her professional debut at just 16 years old. This is still just the beginning of Izzy's story.
No imagination is too wild for a young kid fantasizing about what they may want to be one day, but a parent doesn't typically hear 'professional wrestler' as the answer.
"I was like, three, four years old. I was so hooked right away," said wrestler Izzy Moreno. "I think what was so cool about it is basically the wrestlers portraying good versus evil. And I was like, I have to be a part of that."
"I would never think in a million years, you know, becoming a dad of a little girl that she would become, you know, a wrestler," said Izzy's father, Cody Silagyi.
Izzy went to her parents when she was eight years old, saying what she wanted to grow up to become. That day would come much sooner than expected.
"She came up to me and says, 'Dad, I want to go to wrestling school.' And so I said, 'Baby, there's no wrestling school, But we can work on like all of the things that, like, aren't wrestling'," said Silagyi. "And I remember I was driving home from work and there was a huge old tire and I threw it in the back of my trunk and I brought it to the garage and I said, 'All right, we're going to flip tires'."
She has gone all in: when she was young she became viral as the littlest, most passionate superfan for her favorite wrestler Bayley. She now trains jujitsu, kickboxing, splitting time between Orlando and San Antonio for wrestling programming. She was willing to become part of anything that brought her closer to one day becoming a wrestler herself.
"So I basically got good at everything else but inside the ring. So I used to be a manager inside the ring. I used to have I used to have my own talk show The Hot Side with Izzy, so I would basically preview wrestling shows. I'd interview wrestlers," said Moreno.
Izzy is still young, 16 years old at Winter Springs High School, but she feels she's sacrificed her whole childhood to get to her in-ring debut as a professional in 2023.
"I sat back and I remember right after my wife and I go, 'that's our kid in the ring!'" said Silagyi.
"I was so emotional and I was just like, 'Man, this has been a long time coming' in the words of Taylor Swift," said Moreno.
Izzy embraces still being a teenage girl, holding onto the joy that attracted her to WWE and incorporates it into her wrestling persona, Izzy Moreno, a name she decided on to honor her great grandmother.
"Izzy Moreno is a huge super fan. She's just so in awe that she's inside the ring, she is her biggest fan," said Moreno. "She really wants everybody to be their own biggest fan as well, believe in themselves, even when nobody else is your biggest fan."
In a short amount of time, Izzy dove all in to the world of WWE. She will be moving to San Antonio next year to pursue wrestling full time. Successes are coming her way but Izzy isn't losing sight of that little girl who had a big dream and went all in.
"The wrestlers I was watching inside the ring were my heroes. They inspired me," said Moreno. "They're ultimately the ones that I was like, 'You know what? I'm going to be just like them. And I want to be inside of the ring.'
"Being able to inspire the next generation is just so extremely important because, you know, and I'll never forget the feeling where I felt like I didn't belong in this industry and then I shouldn't have been here. But instead I want to be the type of person that inspires people."