Under the evening lights behind the Liberal Arts and Arts & Humanities Building, cheers echoed across campus as wrestlers threw each other across the ring. Students and families packed around the ropes, watching as masked fighters, monsters and lumberjacks battled for glory and laughs in a Halloween-themed wrestling showcase.

The two-hour event on Oct. 29 was part of Texas A&M’s Lorefest, an annual arts and folklore festival connecting campus and the community through storytelling. Hosted by Lions Pride Sports, the wrestling show combined performance, athleticism and local tradition.

Founded in Bryan-College Station, Lions Pride Sports brings professional wrestling to the Brazos Valley while training the next generation of wrestlers. For Lorefest, the group staged four matches featuring both professionals and students who learned to wrestle in less than a week.

“This event is so great because I actually do lectures at A&M, and I teach people about professional wrestling and the art of professional wrestling,” Lions Pride Sports owner and A&M guest lecturer Houston Carson said. “It takes athleticism, and it’s a lot of theater; it’s a lot of storytelling, psychology, good versus evil.”

Carson founded Lions Pride Sports eight years ago to provide those who are interested in wrestling with hands-on experience in the sport. He said six A&M students stepped into the ring for the first time last week after training for only two days at Lions Pride Sports’ facility.

“They had a lore story that they learned in their class, and then they came to our wrestling school,” Carson said. “We taught them how to learn the fundamentals of wrestling, and then we choreographed these performances, and they crushed it.”

The crowd roared as wrestlers stormed the ring one by one. The show opened with Ax Manson and Karcass defeating Trent Mercer and Chris Chaos and ended with the final match between Hastur and Timur the Great — Hastur emerging victorious.

Each match mixed exciting moves with theatrical moments. Costumes, characters and taunts drew as many cheers from the audience as the wrestling itself, with the crowd reacting to every punch, slam and kick.

Among the loudest reactions came when a lumberjack wrestler known as Ax Manson began peeling off layers of flannel; first one jacket, which revealed another flannel jacket underneath, only for that to be thrown aside, revealing a flannel tank top.

“I play a very simple character — I am a lumberjack who just wears a lot of flannels,” Manson said. “It’s always fun whenever you go to all these other shows and they’re super complex wrestling … but then they see their reaction to me whenever I come out, and I’m just super simple, and they can do all their crazy high flying stuff, and I just gotta take off a flannel and the crowd goes mental.”

Behind the theatrics, Manson said Lions Pride Sports is about teaching fundamentals — not just the moves, but the storytelling and character work that keep the audience engaged with the action.

“We teach fundamentals at the training facility three days of the week,” Manson said. “We go over a lot of basic stuff … rolls, how to bump, how to take hits, how to give hits as real as possible without hurting somebody. Safety is our number one thing because we wanna be doing this for as long as we can.”

He said every match involves both planning and improvisation to adapt to the crowd.

“You can plan out so many moves and what you think a crowd will react to,” Manson said. “But you’re never going to know exactly what the crowd is going to react the most to. So you gotta be able to improv … even if it’s not a move, you have to react as naturally as possible.”

For applied mathematics junior and student wrestler Major McIlvain, the performance was both terrifying and exhilarating.

“It was exciting, “ McIlvain said. “It was nerve-wracking. At the very beginning, some of the stuff they were asking us to do was a little daunting, but I couldn’t speak any higher of [Carson] … he made everything really easy and a lot of fun.”

McIlvain said the group learned basic moves on the first day of training and drilled choreography on the second. By the time he stepped under the lights of the stage, adrenaline took over.

“Definitely the most memorable part was right when we got in the ring,” McIlvain said. “ … People cheering and almost blacking out from the adrenaline and just going at it and just having fun.”

His character, a Vietnamese boogeyman named Ông Ba Bị, was drawn from folklore discussed in class. McIlvain said the role helped him appreciate wrestling as both a sport and an art.

“To tell the whole truth, I can only make it to one day of Lorefest, so I sort of got pigeonholed into wrestling,” McIlvain said. “But after learning just a little bit about it, it’s an absolute blast to do and an absolute blast to watch now.”

McIlvain said that the audience’s cheers after each of his moves made the experience more than worth it. For Carson and his wrestlers, that joy is what keeps the ring alive.

“The most gratifying thing is, you put hundreds and hundreds of hours in private in the ring learning how to do it, with really no reward yet, until you go out and you go through the curtain,” Carson said. “And if you are the bad guy and you’re getting booed, or you are the good guy and you’re getting cheered, that means you’re doing your job.”

As the final match came to a close and fans cheered one last time, Manson said the goal was simple: Make sure everyone walked away smiling.

“My goal every day is just to put on a good show for whoever’s out there watching,” Manson said. “I want everybody in the crowd to feel like they’re a part of the show.”