Pickleball Effect’s Co-Host

This week marks one year since Trenga (right) began co-hosting with Unsicker

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The husky guy with two fully tattooed arms sitting screen right during Pickleball Effect podcasts seems jovial. Kyle Trenga sometimes plays the comedic role to host Braydon Unsicker’s more serious persona.

But Trenga’s upbringing was anything but jovial. It was chaotic.

“My parents were addicted to methamphetamines,” Trenga, 36, tells a writer within minutes of their first conversation. “Ask me anything you want,” he says. “I’m an open book.” 

Chapter one is about Trenga’s difficult childhood.  He grew up poor and his parents were always arguing, usually about money, sometimes about drugs. They got divorced when he was in kindergarten. They were nomadic. By the time Trenga reached third grade, he had lived in San Diego, El Cajon, Tracy, Big Bear and Boise, Idaho.

“With the constant moving I think one of the toughest things to deal with was being the new kid in school quite a few times,” Trenga says.

The toughest thing to deal with was “Watching my parents struggle with addiction. My mom would lock herself in her room for long periods of time and my parents would fight quite a bit when I was young,” Trenga said.

It wouldn’t be surprising if a kid from that environment took the wrong road.

“I have the genes of an addict for sure,” Trenga says. “I have always just focused my addictions in a more positive place. As a kid my addiction was skateboarding and making skateboarding videos. I would do this from sunup to sundown.”

Trenga also loved football. At 5’10/,  260 pounds, he’s built like an offensive lineman, and he was a good one, an all-conference left guard for Capital High School in Boise. He also played rugby, threw the shot put and discuss and was on the school’s snowboarding team. Sports helped keep him out of trouble. His street smarts helped him make good decisions.

Trenga (without hat) was part of a Navy team that rescued Iranian hostages from pirates in 2012.

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He wanted to play college football but wasn’t big enough to play Division 1. “I only got offered to play for a few small schools,” he says. They didn’t offer scholarships and his parents couldn’t afford to pay his college tuition. “Working and playing football sounded like an awful time, so I decided to join the Navy and see the world. I figured that would at least give me six years to figure out what I wanted to do and pay for college.”

So begins chapter two. Trenga learned electronics in the Navy and became an electronic technician. He was also a member of a search and seizure team. He was part of a crew off the Horn of Africa in 2012 that boarded an Iranian fishing vessel and rescued 13 hostages from Somali pirates. The humanitarian gesture made worldwide news.

 Trenga spent six years in the Navy, stationed in San Diego. He did two deployments, the one on the Horn of Africa, another on the South China Sea. When he got out he put his Naval education to good use, becoming an electronic technician in the offshore oil industry. He worked on an oil rig in Thailand. “My job was to fix basically anything with electronics in it, cranes, drilling equipment, motor control, fire detection, telephones.”

He worked 12-hour days and made $150,000 a year. He bought his first home when he was 25, his second at 30. He now works as an electrical engineer for a Japanese semi-conductor supplier near his home in Boise. He has two children from his second marriage, a five-year-old son and two-year-old daughter.

 The former high school football player is a 4.4 pickleball player

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Chapter three: Pickleball. Trenga got into it in 2019. “It’s a sport that is very easy to participate in but difficult to master,” he says.

Trenga plays pickleball three days a week plus five to ten local tournaments and has a 4.4 DUPR (Dynamic Universal Pickleball Rating). He lives 20 minutes from Unsicker’s home in Nampa. He met the Pickleball Effect podcaster in 2020 where else, on a pickleball court. They hit it off immediately.

“I asked Kyle to co-host for a few reasons,” Unsicker tells me. “Our personalities are quite different. He’s more outspoken and socially active, while I’m more introverted.”

This week marks one year that Trenga has co-hosted the Pickleball Effect podcast with Unsicker. “It’s been so great working with him,” Unsicker says. “He is the third podcast co-host I’ve had, and while the other two were great, this relationship has worked out the best. We test paddles together, play together, and talk pickleball all week long with each other.

“I’ve grown the most on the podcast working with him. I’m much more natural, and bring myself to the podcast each week largely because he is very easy to chat with. I owe him a lot and am grateful to be doing this with him,” Unsicker says.

One thing the public doesn’t know about Unsicker, according to Trenga: “He’s a top tier trash talker, which I know surprises some people as he seems very reserved on video.”

Trenga says, “I love to talk and connect with people and doing the podcast has brought me so many new connections to people I consider my friends.”

Trenga’s advice for the typical 3.5 rec player?  “Work on footwork, drops and just getting reps resetting different kinds of shots from the transition zone will skyrocket your skills.”

He agrees with many paddle reviewers who say there’s no reason to spend more than $150 on a paddle. “There are so many good options these days in the budget categories that you can truly get an amazing paddle under $150 that would serve you well no matter your rating.”

Chapter four is not yet written. Ten years from now, Trenga says he hopes to make pickleball a fulltime gig. “It could be working with a company, growing the sport in some way. Maybe a gear related TV show with Braydon. I love the sport and hope to make it a career.”

Trenga says he has a good relationship with his parents, that they have been clean for years and both have good jobs.

Yes, Trenga is more than just Pickleball Effect’s husky, tattooed, jovial co-host.

And considering  jhis childhood, it’s almost a miracle he’s there at all.

Thoughts of the week, not all pickleball

· RIP John Feinstein. The longtime Washington Post reporter and columnist was one of the country’s best sportswriters and the author of numerous bestselling books, including the groundbreaking “A Season on the Brink.” Feinstein died at 69 on Thursday of an apparent heart attack. His former agent said Feinstein had diabetes and gout and hated to fly, which didn’t help his bad eating habits. 

· If any of you have knots in your upper back from so much pickleball, I’d welcome your treatment suggestions. Email them to mhs7386@gmail.com. I have tried stretching, massage, massage chair, creams, foam roller, acupuncture and still wake-up in some pain. Not playing for an extended period is not an option. 

· Three times in the past six months the postal service has screwed up package deliveries for me. They bypassed my local post office, the package sat in an office 10 miles away, then went back across North Carolina about three hours away before being shipped to my local office. Frustrating, especially if you paid extra for expedited shipping.

· I think comedian John Mulaney is very funny doing stand-up. His debut live show on Netflix was a huge disappointment. Just not very funny.

· I don’t like Major League Baseball opening the season in Japan. The games between the Dodgers and Cubs start ridiculously early in the morning in the US and it’s not fair to their fans here. Start time in LA is 3:10 a.m., in Chicago first pitch is at 5:10 a.m. But why should MLB or Fox Sports care about fans when there’s big money to be made?

· College hoops’ March Madness might be my favorite sporting event of the year.

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