By admin 
Storytelling has been a beloved practice among humans across millennia, with dance, music, theater and poetry being favorite mediums for many people. For others, including one group in the Sacramento area, professional wrestling is part of that list.
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For more than 25 years, Supreme Pro Wrestling has been the primary promoter of the highly theatrical professional wrestling scene in the Sacramento region. Up-and-coming athletes cut their teeth in local matches around Northern California, and some have made it to the top levels of wrestling, signed to companies like WWE and the National Wrestling Alliance.
Today, the company is still going strong, with dozens of fighters actively competing at shows across the region and numerous budding performers training at Supreme Pro Wrestling’s Yuba City academy.
Preston Price, a tag-team champion with Supreme Pro Wrestling, said the narrative and collaborative aspects of pro wrestling are what keeps him engaged in the sport-slash-performance-art after years of watching and now participating.
“There’s some people who might want to (plan out a fight), and then there’s a lot of people, more than I even thought in the beginning, that are just like, ‘We’re going to go out there, we’re going to have fun, and this is what we might end on,’” Price said.
Fierce competition
The third Sunday of every month, SPW hosts its main fighting event at Soccer World in Elk Grove. There, a series of tag-team and individual matches run over two to three hours, and multiple ongoing storylines develop across months. Rivalries, relationships, controversy and humor marked some of the main plot points of SPW’s “Fire in the Sky” event on Sunday, July 19.
Price and his teammate, Chase “Brings The Action” Jackson, are the league’s reigning tag-team champions as “The Franchise Playas.” The pair retained their belts Sunday after facing off in a lucha-style match against the Los Clasicos team of Pat Classic and Mikey “The Menace” Melina.
Despite representing SPW as a formidable team, The Franchise Playas hear jeers and boos more often than cheers, as their characters are haughty, arrogant fighters. After their win, in which the pair taunted any team to dare to take them down, a new challenger approached.
A brand-new tag team partnership featuring the charismatic Bobby Callahan and Nick Nightrain, two wrestlers who had fought each other earlier in the evening, vowed to face off against the Playas during SPW’s August fight night.
“(I love) the camaraderie,” said Price, whose real personality is far more amicable than his wrestling character’s. “We go to Yuba City to train twice a week, so we’re really close to each other. A lot of people with SPW have really good hearts.”
Uplifting women wrestlers is a slow but steady effort at SPW, and only a handful of ladies are currently fighting within the league. Trainee wrestlers Susan “Susie” Salazar and Sabrina “Skyla Reyn” Sherman often have fierce face-offs in the ring, and afterward they are commonly found chatting about their match in the green room.
“I feel like in NorCal, there isn’t a lot of women (wrestling),” Sherman said. “You go to the Midwest or the East Coast, and there’s a lot of women running those (matches) … So it’s just nice to represent women in Northern California.”
Supreme Pro Wrestling’s monthly matches at Soccer World, 9756 Kent St., Suite 110 in Elk Grove, are advertised on the league’s Instagram page, and tickets cost $20 per person.
Life-threatening health scare led to new beginnings
Supreme Pro Wrestling launched in 2000 as an independent wrestling promotion company hosting and teaching young fighters how to make a name for themselves in Sacramento and beyond.
Owner Joshua Littell has been at the helm since 2009. From SPW’s early days until last year, he also played the part of a prolific fighter known as Sir Samurai. During a routine fight in April 2025, Littell suddenly went into cardiac arrest and was sent to the ICU, where he received an implanted cardiac defibrillator and was given the order to stop wrestling.
However, Littell hasn’t stepped away from the wrestling world entirely. Since his health scare, the former wrestler has attended every SPW match except one — when he was still recovering in the hospital.
“I’m choosing to stay backstage, I’m no longer an on-air personality,” Littell said. “But I’m really trying to get the next generation to help them live their dreams and find success.”
This up-and-coming generation of fighters trains at SPW’s academy, where they learn core tenets of wrestling, including discipline, technique and, of course, safety.
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Pro wrestling is often viewed as a fake form of fighting, but the flips, jumps and landings are very real — slaps and kicks landed on reddening skin echo throughout SPW’s venues.
Wrestlers as young as 15 currently train with SPW, according to Littell, but they cannot compete until they are 16.
“I grew up as a kid who loves stories, like the bad guy and the good guy,” said Canon Sinclair West, a teenage trainee wrestler at SPW. “Being able to wrestle, being able to do what I love, it makes me hopeful for the future and making people believe that they can do their dreams, no matter how old they are.”
Before they are able to fight, the students get a front row view of the company’s matches as referees and security guards. Though they operate as match officials, these roles also allow them opportunities to practice their acting and improvisational skills.
New student Nicholas “Mondo” Morales started his SPW journey in June, and by early July he was already refereeing his first match.
“Honestly, I have no idea (how long training will take), I’m so brand new to this,” Morales said. “You’ll see me in that ring one day, hopefully you’ll see me in the bigger companies.”
A cult fan base
Though it isn’t one of the big names in pro wrestling, SPW still has a devoted fan base across the capital region and Central Valley, who travel far and wide to see their favorite performers.
“I’ve wrestled in Kansas, Oklahoma, West Virginia and North Carolina, and there were fans that actually planned their vacations around that,” Littell said. “When I came out, unknowing, there were fans in the crowd wearing SPW shirts.”
On July 11-12, SPW put on a show at the annual StocktonCon comic convention in Stockton, entertaining an ever-growing crowd of wrestling fans with tag-team and one-on-one fights throughout the weekend. Longtime SPW fans cheered on their favorite fighters and first-time spectators quickly picked sides.
A shared sentiment among fans and athletes alike is the intimate community feeling of independent leagues like SPW, where wrestlers interact with supporters before heading into the ring and build relationships with their fan base.
“You’re more engaged with the wrestlers,” said SPW fan Joseph Ruiz. “You’re not in front of a TV, you’re actually in front of it. You could yell at them, they’ll yell at you back, it’s great.”
During Sunday’s monthly fight night, more than 100 fans packed into the indoor soccer arena, including some of SPW’s biggest fans. Bex and Dani Fontana fell in love thanks to the independent wrestling league, something Bex Fontana said changed her life.
On one of their earliest dates in 2019, Dani Fontana suggested to his then-girlfriend that they attend an SPW event, and from then on the pair have attended as many fights as they could.
“It’s supporting the wrestlers when they’re just starting,” she said. “It’s fun to see someone starting out, and then all of a sudden they’re on ‘Ring of Honor TV’ or on (All Elite Wrestling), or they make it to WWE, and you’re like ‘I’ve had beers with them!’”
The couple became a beloved friend to many SPW’s fans and athletes alike, and they were even engaged in the ring in 2022 and married by Littell himself in November.
“We get in the ring during intermission (at an SPW show) … all of a sudden, one of the referees handed me a title belt … I look, and it says, ‘Will you marry me?’,” Fontana said. “Wrestling has meant so much to me anyway, this is just an expansion.”
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