Getting to Know Team YouTube
This article originally appeared on The Dink - written by Erik Tice.
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What do a 31-year-old former Division I basketball player from Florida and a 24-year-old former gaming streamer from New Jersey have in common?
Kyle Koszuta and Tanner Tomassi have both found professional pickleball and are both highly-regarded and successful content creators in the pickleball universe.
We recently caught up with "Team YouTube" and learned about their interesting backgrounds, what goes into their content creation and plenty more.
The early years
Kyle Koszuta
Koszuta grew up in the panhandle of Florida in a town called Niceville and has an older brother, Brad. Growing up, Kyle was passionate about three things: basketball, ping pong, and Duke basketball.
Kyle Koszuta was a standout basketball player both in high school and college.
Kyle credits his competitive edge to many hours in the yard shooting hoops with his dad, John, and the family ping ping table, where he had countless battles with his brother. Like many brotherly rivalries, losing to your older sibling enough times in anything will cause you to become more competitive.
Going into high school, Kyle was primarily playing tennis and basketball. After a year of playing both, Koszuta decided he wanted to solely pursue hoops. He admired coach Mike Krzyzewski and the Duke program and idolized JJ Redick, the former Duke great who was just recently named head coach of the Los Angeles Lakers.
Kyle played regional and national AAU tournaments against some of the best players in the world. He specifically remembers a tournament playing against current New York Knick Julius Randle with many D-I coaches in the crowd, including Coach K.
Kyle Koszuta was a standout basketball player both in high school and college.
Kyle averaged 14 pts, 6.3 assists, and 4.5 rebounds per game during his senior year at Niceville High School, leading his team to a District 2-6A title. He was named the All Sports Association/Daily News Boys’ Basketball Player of the Year.
He also graduated high school Magna Cum Laude.
Tanner Tomassi
Tomassi grew up in Ocean City, a beach town in southern New Jersey. He too has an older brother, Damen, and has some of the most unique life experiences of anyone I have met, especially at the young age of 24.
When Tanner was in middle school he loved playing Airsoft (a game where you try to shoot your opponent with plastic pellets powered by compressed gas). Since it was an expensive hobby – especially for a middle schooler – Tanner had to figure out a way to pay for it.
Obviously, his best option was to create a Minecraft server and promote the use of it. His server allowed friends from all over the world to play the popular video game together. Since then, Tomassi has always had an entrepreneurial spirit in life.
Tanner's love for Airsoft turned into paintball. He actually traveled all over the country playing paintball tournaments with his friends. The team was called "The Bomb Squad" and they even competed in a pro tournament in Australia.
Tomassi decided he was going to commit to becoming a good tennis player during his sophomore year of high school, where he played for the JV team. He started training with Brian Godfrey at the Greate Bay Racquet & Fitness Club during the summer and quickly saw results. Tanner went 12-5 for the Ocean City Red Raiders as the No. 1 player during his senior season and led them to the South Jersey Group 3 state tournament.
Photo Credit: Dave O’Sullivan/South Jersey Glory Days
Tomassi credits his senior year tennis coach, Tim Kelley, with his attitude toward tennis and life. Kelley primarily focused on improvement – losing a match didn’t matter, what mattered was self-improvement. Tanner has taken that mantra into his pickleball career.
The college years
Kyle was recruited by a few D-I schools (not Duke, unfortunately), and eventually chose to attend and play basketball at University of Louisiana - Monroe (ULM). As a big fan of JJ Redick, obviously Kyle became a dialed in three-point shooter.
During his freshman year, Kyle led the ULM Warhawks in three-point field goal percentage at 44.4 percent (24-54), averaging 3.7 points in 15.3 minutes per game. However, Koszuta fell off in his sophomore year, only shooting 29 percent from deep.
A change of scenery was needed, so Kyle transferred to D-II Rollins College in Orlando. He averaged 30 percent from deep in his two years there while playing 11.7 minutes per game. He graduated from Rollins in 2016 with a degree in Business Management and was a member of the Rollins Athletic Director’s Honor Roll.
Koszuta was frustrated and disappointed with himself about his college basketball career and basically didn’t touch a basketball after college and took a 9-5 job in a hospital.
One of Kyle’s best friends was working at Point Guard College (PGC), one of the elite junior basketball camps in the country. He called Kyle and asked for some help coaching and slowly but surely, Kyle fell back in love with basketball and worked up to a Director level position within the organization.
Kyle was very instrumental in turning the camp to a virtual experience during the pandemic, shooting hundreds of hours of content.
Tanner decided to attend Rowan University – about an hour north of his hometown in Jersey – and graduated in 2022 with a degree in Business Administration.
Rowan only had a club tennis team and Tanner traveled home on the weekends, so he decided not to play tennis in college. COVID hit during his sophomore year and he was sent home while taking online classes.
Quickly after returning home, he saw the gaming streamer Tfue winning Fortnite tournaments and making money streaming. Tanner asked himself, "Why can’t I do that?" So he started streaming on Facebook Gaming as "BalencisBattles." When I say Tanner is obsessed and dedicated to whatever he is doing – his streaming venture is the epitome of that.
Tanner's mother, Pam, helping him with his streaming career.
While attending Rowan, Tanner streamed full-time for three years. He missed a total of nine days during that time. He streamed two hours in the morning and two hours in the evening religiously. He got over 300,000 TikTok followers and became a Partnered Facebook Gamer.
While he was traveling for paintball, he even bought an elaborate portable gaming console to ensure he wouldn’t miss a streaming opportunity. Additionally, his mom would stream with him sometimes and/or stream for him.
Finding Pickleball
Kyle discovered pickleball in August of 2022 through some friends and immediately got hooked. He took lessons for a few months, quickly moving from a 3.5 to a 5.0 player. He decided he wanted to go pro in December of 2022 and has a goal of becoming a top 10 player in the world.
Koszuta started getting really good by playing with local Phoenix-area players like Pesa Teoni and Craig Johnson. He got noticed and played in both seasons of the Arizona Pickleball League at The Orchard in Scottsdale.
Kyle was part of the "Breaking Pickleball" documentary during Season 1 of the Arizona Pickleball League. He played for the two seasons and started competing on the APP and PPA Tours in 2023.
Koszuta was injured for the first half of this year – he suffered a right wrist injury practicing his backhand flicks too much. During the six months he was sidelined, he actually practiced left handed and got to a 4.5 level.
Kyle is obsessed with pickleball – he plays nearly every day and does a ton of video – both for scouting and self improvement and for content creation.
His mom recently declared to him: "You have to be in the top 1 percent of people most obsessed with pickleball. You are always thinking about pickleball, playing pickleball and watching pickleball."
Tanner found pickleball in early 2021, playing at courts near his house with some friends. He played his first tournament a few months later and got bronze at the 4.0 level. He was still streaming Fortnite then and focused on three things during that year – school at Rowan, pickleball, and streaming Fortnite.
After graduating from Rowan, Tanner slowly phased out of Fortnite and started playing more pickleball. He worked his way up from a 4.0 to 5.0 over the next year or so and in early 2023, Tanner decided he wanted to pursue becoming a pro.
In 2023, Tanner was selected to participate in the eight-day pickleball reality TV show at Pickleball Kingdom in Chandler, AZ. The "Pickleball Paddle Battle" was hosted by Clayton Edward, the Season 26 "The Bachelor." It also included other pickleball pros Angie Walker, Kaitlyn Kerr, Danny Jensen, Jennifer Tavernier, Jessica Mason, and Kevin Wong, among others. The release date of the reality series is still TBD.
So again, when Tanner decides he is going to do something, he goes all in. He is now splitting his time between Delray Beach and his hometown of Ocean City. He currently stays in Florida in the winter and Jersey in the summer.
While in New Jersey, Tanner trains twice a week with Richard Livornese Jr. and also trains some singles with Frank Anthony Davis. On days when he isn’t playing with them, he drills and plays with some other local 5.5 guys in his area while cross training in the gym almost daily. In Florida, Tanner is usually playing several hours per day with all of the various high-level pros in the area.
Playing together at APP Newport Beach
Tanner and Kyle played together recently at the APP Newport Beach Open, working their way through men’s doubles pro qualifiers.
The APP does one game to 15 for qualifying, win by two, regular scoring. Kyle and Tanner had to win three matches to qualify for the main draw and did so with a combined score of 45-6, giving up an average of two points per match.
"Team YouTube" advanced to play in the first round of the main draw where they faced John Cangelosi and Eduardo Irizarry, beating them 11-7, 11-4. A good win for sure, but next up was the overall No. 1 seed, Erik Pailet and Rob Nunnery.
This match was literally the closest match possible, as Pailet/Nunnery won the first game, 12-10. Tomassi/Koszuta climbed their way back and upset the top seed, winning games two and three, 11-9, marking by far the biggest win of both of their careers.
They then faced Brandon Lane and Jayden Broderick in the quarterfinals and advanced with a 4-11, 11-8, 11-2 victory.
The script was flipped in the semifinals. Tanner and Kyle won the first game against Will Howells and Patrick Kawka, 11-4. They then went up big in the second game 8-4 before losing, 8-11. They lost their momentum and dropped the final game, 2-11.
The duo plans to play at least five more tournaments together on both the APP and PPA Tours in 2024.
Content Creation
Kyle and Tanner are some of the biggest educational content creators in the pickleball space. Kyle has 125,000 subscribers on YouTube and 107,000 followers on Instagram and won The Dink 2023 YouTube Content Creator of the Year. Tanner has over 32,000 subscribers on YouTube and 60,000 followers on Instagram.
Even though they are both educational creators, their content and approach couldn’t be more different. Kyle is much more analytical and curriculum driven, while Tanner likes to go with the flow.
Kyle – known as "ThatPickleballGuy" – focuses on creating educational content that is digestible for any level of player. He focuses on really great video production and scripted lesson plans for his content. For longer videos, he takes a ton of time understanding the purpose of the video while using a teleprompter and multiple video angles.
Kyle credits Lili Thompson – a friend from PGC basketball camps – with a lot of his success because of her social media agency. Lili and her team do most of his YouTube editing, but since they have been such good friends for so long, Koszuta feels like Thompson is almost an extension of him when it comes to the finished product.
Koszuta has announced that he is starting "ThatPickleballSchool," which will be an online program geared toward players who are taking training seriously. There will be amazing content, but the school will also have a community aspect, which is very intriguing. Struggling with a certain shot or strategy? You will have the ability to ask Kyle questions directly while also asking the community of pickleballers as well.
Tanner’s approach is totally opposite of Kyle’s. He doesn’t want his content creation to feel like work, so he makes a lot more short clips (usually one minute or less). He started making his content almost a year ago (350 days to be exact) and has developed quite a following.
You may think to yourself, wow that’s a specific number, how can he be sure? Because Tanner has 350 videos uploaded to all of his platforms. That's right. Tanner has posted a video a day since he started content creation – without missing a single day.
Tanner can put together a video in approximately 45 minutes. He uses his iPhone to shoot the content. He either uses a tripod, his girlfriend, or his mom to help shoot everything. He goes to the courts with an idea of what topic he wants to review and then he just wings it. He likes to let his thoughts flow and usually takes 15-20 minutes to shoot. After that, it's another 20-25 minutes to edit (which he does himself) and then he uploads. Simple and efficient.
Even though their style of education is very different, Kyle and Tanner are some of the best teachers of the game. They are both excited to continue playing together in the second half of 2024 and want to continue getting better and make great content for pickleball players around the world.
Be on the lookout for "Team YouTube" in upcoming pro tournaments and check out their great content. It'll make you better in no time.