There’s tough—and then there’s Allison Danger tough. The kind of tough that wears eyeliner and scars with equal pride. The kind of tough that gets up from a fractured clavicle, an ECW table bump, a brain lesion, and a WWE heartbreak, and still walks back into the locker room with a clipboard in one hand and a student’s future in the other.
Born Cathy Allison Corino on March 31, 1977, in Winnipeg, she was the younger sibling in a wrestling family built on headlocks and hammer fists. Her brother Steve Corino, a journeyman tough guy in ECW and ROH, opened the back door to the wrestling world—but it was Allison who kicked it off its hinges.
Her story didn’t begin with pyro or reality TV. It started like all good indie wrestling tales: in a school gymnasium in Pennsylvania, where she subbed in for The Sandman’s wife as a valet and liked it so much, she signed up for suplexes. That was 2000. And by 2001, she was already tagging up and winning titles in the Independent Wrestling Federation with Rapid Fire Maldonado, taking bumps that made chiropractors wince and wearing her “punk chick with a chip on her shoulder” persona like a badge of honor.
Cornette would’ve said, “She’s not your diva dolly. She’s the girl in high school who’d beat you in street hockey and key your Camaro for fun.”
By 2003, Danger was already racking up miles on the indie circuit, from Jersey All Pro to IWA Mid-South to a last-minute Japanese tour that had her stepping in for Daffney. And if you can step in for Daffney, you’re not a backup—you’re a blueprint.
But it was in Ring of Honor where Allison Danger made her name, her mark, and her enemies.
She joined ROH managing the Christopher Street Connection, took a table bump from Da Hit Squad on night one—because of course she did—and then jumped into the boiling heel stable The Prophecy with Christopher Daniels, taking on ROH’s code of honor with as much venom as any man on the roster. For the next few years, she was the scheming backbone of a faction that made purists clutch their pearls and got fans to foam at the mouth.
Danger didn’t just play a part—she played chess. When Dan Maff and B.J. Whitmer turned on her, she didn’t just cry about betrayal. She put a bounty on their heads. Literally. She was booking their matches, working them into exhaustion, screwing them over like a femme fatale with a clipboard.
Jim Cornette probably watched her with a smirk and muttered, “Now that’s how you write heat.”
She left ROH in 2007 when Daniels did, but Danger had already built her legacy into the beams of that promotion. She’d been the voice behind the monsters, the manipulator, the glue—and when she left, it took more than one woman to replace her.
Then came her biggest impact—not in front of a crowd, but behind the curtain.
In 2005, Allison Danger helped launch SHIMMER Women Athletes alongside Dave Prazak, a company that treated women’s wrestling as a sport, not a side show. This wasn’t bikini contests and catfights. This was ironwoman matches, blood feuds, real storytelling, and real stakes.
SHIMMER was where the future went to get tough.
Becky Lynch? Sara Del Rey? Cheerleader Melissa? Daizee Haze? Ember Moon? They all passed through SHIMMER’s gauntlet. And at the center was Allison Danger—booking, managing, training, and still wrestling with a fractured clavicle and a smirk that said, “I’m gonna make you a star, kid, but you’re gonna bleed first.”
She feuded with Rebecca Knox before Kacy Catanzaro ever set foot on a NXT trampoline. She went to war with Portia Perez and the Canadian NINJAs, dropped Daizee Haze with shoot promos, and re-aggravated a shoulder injury only to lace ‘em up again. She even formed a tag team with Leva Bates—Regeneration X—before cosplay in wrestling became mainstream currency.
Her final SHIMMER match came in 2013. It was supposed to be a sendoff—but it came with a gut punch. Danger had suffered a stroke earlier that year. Lesions were found in her brain. The kind that don’t kill you, but whisper every morning that they might. She wrestled her farewell bout anyway, wrapped in resolve, bandaged in pride. It ended with a reversed decision, because even in goodbye, Danger was subverting the finish.
Bobby Heenan would’ve raised an eyebrow and said, “She could’ve out-managed me—and that’s saying something.”
Her post-wrestling life wasn’t all roses and legends deals. In 2021, Danger was brought in as a coach at the WWE Performance Center. Finally—finally—the wrestling machine was giving her the keys to shape the next generation full time.
But three months later, WWE yanked the rug out from under her. Budget cuts? Corporate nonsense? Whatever it was, they dumped her like expired catering. And worse, she’d just moved to Florida, signing a lease and uprooting her life while her husband—Swiss wrestler Ares—had just bought them a home in the Carolinas.
In her own words, it left her “financially and emotionally ruined.”
But again, Allison Danger doesn’t stay down. In 2022, she joined Maria Kanellis’ Women’s Wrestling Army as a coach, giving back to the scene that never forgot her, even if the billionaires did. She became the voice of reason in the chaos, the steady hand in a business of carny flash and broken promises.
She married Ares in 2008. They have a daughter. She hosts podcasts, trains women in Las Vegas, and still shows up at indie shows with the same conviction she had when she was eating steel tables in Ring of Honor.
Allison Danger is wrestling’s Swiss Army Knife—a manager, commentator, trainer, booker, announcer, and actual in-ring badass. She never got the mainstream spotlight. Never headlined WrestleMania. Never needed to.
Because everyone who mattered in wrestling—from Daffney to Daniels to the thousands of women she helped usher into greatness—knew exactly who she was:
The woman who built the damn road, so others could run it.
And she did it the hard way—on her terms, with danger stitched into her name, her tights, and her legacy.
