Resolve Wrestling: Inside the rebuild of Sunshine Coast pro wrestling

Keeping it alive: how Josh turned a Facebook post into Resolve Wrestling

There’s a version of this story where Josh becomes the man who bought UPW. He does the due diligence, signs the paperwork, and inherits a promotion with a decade of history behind it. That’s not what happened. Instead, the deal fell through, the seller went quiet, and Josh was left with nothing but an idea he couldn’t shake. So he built his own promotion instead. Today that promotion is Resolve Wrestling, and it’s trying to do something simple but not easy: keep professional wrestling alive on the Sunshine Coast.

The post at the right moment

Josh’s path back into wrestling wasn’t a straight line. He’s a Sydney transplant, having relocated to southeast Queensland about eighteen months ago and like a lot of people, he says, it came down to house prices. Sydney simply wasn’t going to happen; the Sunshine Coast was.

Not long after the move, curiosity got the better of him and he went along to a tryout run by UPW (United Pro Wrestling), just to see what the local scene looked like. Life intervened with a house purchase, a new city, the usual chaos of relocating and he never followed up. Then, right around the time he started wondering whether UPW might be running another tryout, a very different kind of post showed up in his feed: the promotion was up for sale.

“And the rest is history,” he says.

Josh made contact, sat down for a conversation, toured the promotion’s facility and its marquee venue, Aussie World, and collated everything he needed to make a decision. A price was floated, and it was one he was prepared to pay. Then, just as he was following up with his own research, the seller’s side went quiet. Soon after, local news coverage surfaced the reasons why: UPW had closed in the wake of legal trouble, reportedly in October, and gone up for sale not long after.

“That place [Aussie World] was worth so much, not just in money, but in exposure,” Josh explains. Losing it meant the promotion’s biggest asset was gone. The name still meant something, he says, and the equipment would have been valuable too a ring is a genuinely hard thing to get hold of in this market. But without the venue, the numbers no longer worked, and the deal never came back together. In the end, he walked away with nothing from the negotiation.

Rather than treat that as a dead end, Josh treated it as a sunk cost of a different kind. “I thought, well, I’m invested in the idea. So let’s just start our own.”

Learning the territory

Losing the deal for UPW didn’t mean losing interest in Brisbane and the broader southeast Queensland scene, but it did mean rethinking where Resolve Wrestling should actually plant its flag. Queensland, Josh points out, runs on a territory system that’s unusually well respected compared to other states. UPW had run shows at a handful of Brisbane venues over the years, and those options were technically still there for the taking. Josh decided against it.

“I don’t know if I want to stir the pot there,” he says. “I feel like the Sunshine Coast is meant to be the focus.”

That decision shapes almost everything else about how Resolve operates. Rather than compete for Brisbane’s already-established audience, Josh has positioned the promotion as a collaborator with the wrestling scene around it. He’s working with Three Count Academy for ring access, has been in touch with promotions like Wide Bay, and reached out to Gold Coast’s Impact Pro Wrestling simply to introduce Resolve and signal an intent to cooperate rather than compete. So far, he says, every promotion they’ve approached has been receptive.

It’s a philosophy born partly out of necessity because Queensland is enormous, and the logistics of running wrestling across it are brutal. A promotion on the Gold Coast is, geographically, a completely different proposition to one on the Sunshine Coast or one in Rockhampton or Cairns, where a thriving scene exists largely on its own. Talent driving from one side of the state to the other for a booking is a serious investment of time and money. By Josh’s estimate, getting from Brisbane to the Sunshine Coast is genuinely easier than crossing Melbourne. Even so, the wrestlers on Resolve’s first show were a mix from the Gold Coast, Brisbane, and locally, all who made the drive without complaint. “The attitude of all of them was: I get to wrestle, so yeah, I’ll drive,” Josh says. “One of the most committed bunches I’ve seen.”

Long term, Josh thinks the fragmented nature of Australian wrestling promotion is something the whole scene needs to solve together, not something any single promotion can fix alone. He’d like to see promoters more organised as a group even something as simple as a shared group chat between promotions as a way of keeping the peace and coordinating instead of accidentally competing.

Reslove Wrestling’s first show

Resolve has run one show so far, and by Josh’s own account it was executed about as well as a first show can go. It broke even, but no huge windfall either, which for a debut event he’s more than happy with.

None of that happened by accident. Josh credits a team around him: Maddie and the crew from Three Count Academy, who supplied and set up the ring; Angus, who worked as cameraman while also managing a lot of the production and non-wrestling logistics; and two people Josh calls his right-hand men. One working under his wrestling name Ricky Rembrandt, handling the “producer” side of things, sitting down with talent and walking through their matches, and another, credited here by his preferred alias Bo Taylor, an active wrestler who handled logistics and general setup around the ring.

Josh describes the lead-up as months of stress and anxiety wrapped around a single mantra, I’ve got to get this sorted, I’ve got to get this right.He says the payoff was hearing, repeatedly, that the show felt genuinely well organised. That didn’t mean it went off without a hitch. A pre-show match ran into some confusion about its own details, and Josh still second-guesses the decision, wishing in hindsight they’d simply started the card ten minutes earlier and made it the true opening match rather than something that could read as a throwaway. There were the usual first-time-in-a-new-venue audio-visual hiccups too. But once the first bell rang, he says, something shifted. “I could breathe,” he recalls. “It started now and it’s going to be easier now, and whatever happens, happens.”

Afterward, Josh and his core team of Ricky and Bo Taylor in particular, ran a proper debrief, talking through what worked and what didn’t, and checking in individually with most of the wrestlers involved to gather feedback. That process is already shaping the plan for the next show.

The business of small business

Ask Josh whether you can make a living as an Australian wrestling promoter and he’ll reach for an old line: if you want to make a million dollars as a wrestling promoter, start with two million. Bigger shows at bigger venues with bigger crowds can support something closer to a living, he says. That’s not the model he’s chasing, and he doesn’t think it’s the right way to approach it regardless. If Resolve nets a couple hundred dollars a show over the course of a year, that’s a nice holiday fund, not a salary. The real target is simpler: don’t lose money.

That mindset comes, in part, from watching his parents run their own business. The family relocated to the Sunshine Coast in tandem with buying a signage shop, which they’ve since sold. Years of observing their successes and mistakes left Josh with what he describes as a naturally business-minded streak, and it shows in how deliberately he talks about Resolve as a small business first and a passion project second. A lot of promoters treat the role as a hobby, he notes; he doesn’t think that framing survives contact with the actual economics of running shows.

That same instinct is why he walked away from the original UPW deal rather than pushing through on sentiment. Once the numbers stopped adding up, he says, that had to be the end of it, “anyone going into this needs to have a clear business sense.”

Wrestling runs deep

Josh’s connection to wrestling goes back further than Resolve, or even UPW. His earliest wrestling memory is watching Stone Cold Steve Austin march to the ring which was a moment he places in the mid-2000s, likely one of the “Attitude Era” retrospective airings rather than the era itself, but a formative one regardless. He came up during the tail end of the Monday Night Wars period and has no illusions about the chaos of that time being anything other than some of the best wrestling has produced arguably the very thing that dragged the industry into the mainstream in the first place.

About thirteen years ago, Josh began training in Sydney at what he describes as the Australian Pro Wrestling Gym, wrestling mostly on the gym’s own shows for two and a half to three years, with the occasional battle royal appearance further afield and a stint working on a pole for IWA around twelve years ago. After stepping away from active competition, he stayed loosely connected to the scene, refereeing here and there, running entrance music for FWA on one memorable occasion involving Carlito (the music cue did not go smoothly; as Josh puts it, “happens to the best of us”).

That history is a big part of why the UPW opportunity resonated the way it did. It wasn’t a stranger buying a business. It was someone with real skin in the game, coming back around to something he’d once stepped away from. Asked about his biggest failure connected to wrestling, Josh doesn’t point to Resolve’s first show or even the collapsed UPW deal, but further back: walking away from wrestling roughly a decade ago. He’s since found his way back into it, on his own terms, running his own promotion which, he figures, is as close to a redemption arc as this story needs.

Growing something from nothing

One of the things Josh keeps coming back to is how much creative freedom comes with building a promotion from scratch. Where an established territory carries decades of continuity and expectation, the Sunshine Coast is close to a blank slate. Some of the wrestlers who appeared on Resolve’s first show had never worked a Sunshine Coast date before — their entire careers had run through Brisbane, the Gold Coast, or elsewhere. For Josh, that’s an opportunity as much as a gap: a chance to give performers room to develop characters and ideas that never quite got the runway to be fleshed out properly elsewhere.

It’s also, he says, the part of the job that gives him something nothing else in his life quite does: a genuine creative outlet. On top of the sheer satisfaction of pulling off a successful show. Booking the card, shaping the arc of a match without dictating every beat, deciding what story gets told and how it builds over time: that’s where the appeal lives for him, more than any other part of running the business.

What “making it” looks like

Resolve’s current schedule is deliberately conservative. Three more shows are locked in for the rest of the year in September, October, and December with next year’s calendar being held back intentionally rather than rushed into. Josh wants time to properly absorb the lessons of year one before committing to 2027 dates, likely resuming in late February after a natural January break. From there, the ambition is to build toward a monthly schedule.

The bigger picture goes further still. Josh’s stated long-term vision is regular, accessible Australian wrestling on YouTube which is a platform he prefers precisely because it’s free and doesn’t assume anyone has a Netflix or Stan subscription, and because a single upload can reach viewers in the US, the UK, and anywhere else in the world simultaneously, in a way traditional television never could. But he’s clear-eyed that no single promotion is likely to pull that off alone; his read is that the best shot any promotion has at putting Australian wrestling in front of a wider audience is a genuinely collaborative push across multiple promotions, rather than one outfit trying to go it alone.

Pressed on what success actually looks like day to day, Josh keeps coming back to one idea: being the choice. Queensland is big enough that Resolve will inevitably find itself competing for the same weekend as another promotion’s show, or for the same wrestler’s availability against another offer. The moment fans and talent start actively preferring Resolve over the alternative not by default, but by preference that’s the signal he’s watching for. Bigger, healthier crowds matter too, but that sense of being the preferred option is, in his words, “a good indicator.”

If Resolve has a mission statement right now, Josh is refreshingly unpretentious about it: keep wrestling alive on the Sunshine Coast. Not a Steve Jobs-style rallying cry, he admits, but a clear one is a line that keeps the whole operation focused on the actual job in front of it, with room for something more elaborate to develop around it later.

Asked what he wants Resolve’s legacy to be, the answer is just as direct. Fun. Whether someone walks away having been a wrestler on the card or a fan in the crowd, Josh wants their memory of a Resolve show to be a good time full stop. If that adds up, over time, to having kept wrestling healthy and alive on the Sunshine Coast, that’s the outcome he’s chasing. Nobody, he jokes, is walking away from this saying they made a million dollars.

Looking forward

Even mid-interview, Josh’s instinct to think about the wider wrestling landscape doesn’t switch off. Asked about growth opportunities for talent, he points well beyond Australia’s borders to Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand in particular, where he describes the talent pool as genuinely exceptional, name-checking promotions like Grapple Max and Singapore Pro Wrestling. He sees the idea of talent swaps working in reverse for promotions these cross-border relationships benefit everyone involved.

The broader instinct to look outward, build relationships, don’t assume Australia is a closed loop runs through a lot of how Josh talks about Resolve’s future.

What’s next

Practical matters are already on the agenda. Resolve Wrestling is keen to stay in contact with their fans. It’s a hedge against the very real risk of losing contact with their entire audience over time. With gaps of a few months between shows, keeping that audience warm between events is likely to become one of Resolve Wrestling’s next real priorities, alongside the task of lining up sponsors.

For a promotion that’s run exactly one show, Resolve already has a clear sense of what it’s trying to be: locally rooted, deliberately collaborative rather than territorial, financially sober, and built around the idea that a good night of wrestling is worth protecting on its own terms. Whether it becomes something bigger than the Sunshine Coast remains to be seen. For now, Josh seems entirely comfortable with the job actually in front of him and keeping wrestling alive on the Sunshine Coast, one show at a time.

You can check out Resolve Wrestling here and don’t miss their next live show