Saya Kamitani won her first championship gold since joining H.A.T.E when she defeated Yuuki Miyazaki to become the 23rd Regina di Wave Champion on the 4th November.
Now, Pro-Wrestling Wave have begun the process of identifying Saya’s first challenger for the belt by way of NEXT2024; a sixteen woman single-elimination tournament beginning on the 16th November in Shin-Kiba 1st RING.
Among those sixteen names is Stardom’s Koguma, who has recently come off a loss in the NJPW Strong Women’s Championship number 1 contendership four-way match at Fighting Spirit Unleashed. Should she be successful and go on to challenge Saya, it will be their first ever singles match, and Koguma’s first singles title match since August 2023; an unsuccessful bid for Saki Kashima’s High Speed Championship in Osaka.
It won’t be easy though, with fifteen other women to get past, the full field being as follows;
- Yumi Ohka
- Yuki Miyazaki
- Kohaku
- Honoka
- Tomoka Watanabe
- Cherry
- Kurumi Hiiragi
- Koguma
- Maika Ozaki
- Itsuki Aoki
- Kakeru Sekiguchi
- Hikaru Shimizu
- Haruka Umesaki
- Nanami
- YuuRI
- Mizuki Kato
The rules of the tournament have been outlined in full in a Tokyo Sports article, which has been helpfully translated by Mera Wrestling on Twitter. Each round will be drawn randomly, with no bracket in place for the tournament. The first round will have a 10-minute time limit, the second round will increase to 15-minutes, the semi-finals to 20 with the final then being wrestled with no time-limit. Interestingly, any match that ends in any type of draw will see the younger wrestler will progress to the next round – irrelevant of experience!
The tournament will run from November 16th in Shin-Kiba 1st RING through to December 15th in Osaka.
Stay tuned to The Stardom Cast for all the happenings in the world of STARDOM.
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