Renee Young Confirms SummerSlam is Her Last Event With WWE

WWE’s SummerSlam Kickoff show opened with Charly Caruso, Peter Rosenberg, Booker T, JBL and Renee Young at the Amway Center inside WWE’s ThunderDome. As Caruso introduced everyone on the panel, Young stated outright that tonight would be her final night with the company. News broke earlier this week that Young had given her notice to the company a week prior, but up until this point she had refrained from commenting publicly. Young said, “Guys i am excited to be here, doing my last hurrah with WWE. And I’d be no other place than here with this beautiful panel… in the ThunderDome!”

Young first joined WWE in 2012, and has worked as a backstage interviewer and host of numerous kickoff shows, Talking Smack and WWE Backstage. She became the first woman in company history to work as a full-time commentator for the Monday Night Raw brand, a position she held from late 2018 to late 2019.

Young admitted in an interview shortly after she left the commentary team that she didn’t feel quite right in the role.

“I never felt comfortable doing that job,” Young told the Sports Illustrated Media Podcast. “It was a very stressful year, to be completely honest. You look in that situation, I’m here in WWE and the first female to come into the [backstage] role…. I needed something else to chew on. Michael Cole and Triple H pulled me aside one week and said, ‘You’re going to do commentary on Raw.’ I was like, ‘What? Why? Who approved this? Whose was this?’ But, like with anything, I was gonna try to figure it out.

“To go out there and call three hours of wrestling, coming from the background I come from, I’m a host, and I like to have more of a bubbly personality and that was what fans have been a little bit more drawn to. Or my sarcastic side, I can be a smartass. It’s hard to do that on commentary, especially when you’ve got [Corey] Graves, who is great at that. But also stepping in there as a third person. I’m used to being the ‘A person,’ I get to drive the ship. So to have Cole and Graves there be in there rhthym and I’m trying to jump in there and everything has kinda everything already been said, it was odd. I tried to come at it from a fan standpoint, but then that doesn’t always work, that doesn’t always necessarily seem to be what they want you to be saying or doing. I just always felt a little misdirection about what my purpose was when I was out there.”