Minium: If Not For His Mother's Courage, ODU Defensive End Kris Trinidad Says "I Would Not Be Here"

By Harry Minium

NORFOLK, Va. – LaToya Trusell was a college freshman from Queens, New York, who had left home just weeks earlier to attend school in Rhode Island. Not yet old enough to drink nor even vote, she was nonetheless confronted with a very adult, life-altering decision.

She learned shortly after classes began, and just before her 18th birthday, that she was pregnant.

Having a child is, of course, a lifetime commitment. It would mean tons of work and a loss of some freedom and would make earning a college degree all the more difficult.

Friends and faculty members urged her to have an abortion, and while she doesn’t judge those who make that choice, her religious convictions ruled that out as an option.

Instead, she decided she would put her child up for adoption.

But then she went into labor seven weeks before her expected delivery date. And while in the hospital, she was informed that she wasn’t just pregnant with one child.

“You have twins, a boy and a girl,” she recalls being told.  

Hours later, as she held her children in her arms, “I realized that I could not give them up,” she said.

“I had to raise them.”

Now, 22 years later, she says “I thank God every day” she made that decision.

And with good reason.  

Twins Kris and Kendel Trinidad have grown into incredible young people. They both graduated from Old Dominion University last spring, and while Kendel is unsure about her career path, she is working and considering a career in the Navy.

Kris, meanwhile, is a star player for the ODU football team.

A 6-foot-5, 272-pound defensive lineman, he was an All-Sun Belt preseason choice, and is a captain for ODU, which plays at Virginia Tech Saturday at 7.

Kris Trinidad is just about everything you would hope for in a student-athlete. He’s a fifth-year senior and while there are a ton of fifth-year seniors in college football, few, in this age of NIL and the transfer portal, have played at one school.

He surely would have made a lot of money had he put his name in the transfer portal.

“It speaks to what a loyal young man he is, and to how much he loves Old Dominion, that he’s still here,” said ODU Head Coach Ricky Rahne.

He has a degree in cyber security in hand and is working on a Master’s degree, but still takes time out to volunteer in the community with other football players, be it feeding the homeless or mentoring elementary school students.

“He loves people,” said Victor Irokansi, ODU’s defensive line coach. “He has a very genuine heart. People love to be around him.”

And he’s overcome much adversity. Since his senior year, he’s lost nearly half a dozen friends, some in accidents, but most to gun violence.

“It seems like there’s been one a year” ever since the pandemic, his mother said. “It’s been so hard for him.”

Through it all, he said his mother has been his inspiration.

“My Mom, she’s my rock,” he said. “I wouldn’t be here without her; we wouldn’t be here without her.

“The sacrifices she made, the things she went through, I couldn’t understand at the time. But I understand now. And I’m in awe of all she did for us.”

LaToya went home to Queens for Christmas 22 years ago without her children, who because they were premature, were still hospitalized.

She hadn’t told her family yet that she was a mother. When she broke the news, her family was shocked but quickly embraced her and her twins.

After her children were released from the hospital, she moved home and family helped care for her kids.

“It truly does take a village to raise children,” she said. “I had so much help from my family. I could not have done this without their help.”

But even with her family’s help, she found trying to make ends meet in New York to be too much for a single Mom.

“I was working two jobs and didn’t have anything to show for it,” she said. “The cost of living in New York was so expensive.”

When Kris and Kendel were still toddlers, she picked up and moved to Richmond, where family members also lived.

She took online classes while again working full-time and for the longest time, struggled to make ends meet. “When we were really young, we didn’t have much,” Kris said.

 She persevered and earned her associate’s degree in 2012 and her bachelor’s degree in 2014. That led to a job with the Bank of America.

“And that’s when things began to take a turn for the better,” Kris said.

LaToya was determined to shield her children from as many of the negative influences that kids are often exposed to.

She insisted that they play sports – Kendel even played community football with boys until she hit puberty, when her mother suggested she begin playing sports with her female friends.

“And she was a very good player,” Latoya said.

Kris was more of a challenge, she said, in that he was hyperactive and always full of energy.

“Kris was so smart. He had the chance to skip grades twice,” she said.

“But he wasn’t emotionally mature enough, so I held him back.”

And kept him busy.  

“I think all kids have the opportunity to go the wrong way,” she said. “Sports helped him. It locked up his free time. He was always doing something. Even during the off season, coaches would have him out there doing conditioning, which kept him away from anything on the wrong side.

“He was always at home, at school or at church.”

Although he’s an all-league player now, Kris did not have football success right out of the gate. He was cut from the Lloyd Bird High School football team as a freshman, an experience that might have discouraged others from trying again.

But he persevered and made the team as a sophomore and played varsity football and basketball as a junior and senior.

As a senior, he weighed less than 200 pounds, downright tiny for a defensive lineman, and with just a week to go before national signing day in February of 2021, he had no college scholarship offers.

“I was online one day, thinking that maybe I should go ahead and join the Army,” Kris said.

It didn’t help Kris that the COVID pandemic was raging, and that all recruiting had to be done by Zoom – neither coaches nor players were allowed to travel. Nor did it help that Lloyd Bird had little success in its pandemic-shortened season.

“During that time, I think a lot of really good football players got overlooked,” Rahne said.

His sister had already lined up some academic scholarships. Kris had counted on an athletics scholarship.

“I had no plan and didn’t have the money for college,” he said.

But then coaches at Army called him and offered a scholarship days before signing day. He was ecstatic.

Just hours later, came a call from Rahne, who quickly sold both himself and ODU to Kris.

“He said he had a plan to build ODU’s program into something special and that I was a vital piece of that plan,” he said. “He was so impressive.”

He talked to his mother and grandmother, and they all got on a Zoom call with Rahne.

“They gave us a virtual tour of the campus and we were sold,” he said. “We were so impressed with Coach Rahne and his staff.”

As he prepared to enroll at ODU that summer, he realized that for the first time in his life, he and Kendel would be separated.

Twins can have an abnormally close relationship, and that was true for Kris and Kendel. They not only went to school together and studied together but also took the same classes and did homework together.

“We were inseparable,” he said.

His family came to ODU late that summer to visit him during campus move-in week, the time when students generally move into dormitories.

He had already been on ODU’s campus for more than a month and wasn’t adjusting particularly well to life without his sister.

“I really missed her,” he said.

“I thought she was going to Virginia Tech or Penn State. She’d been admitted to both schools and had scholarships to both schools.

“But I looked in the car and there were bags and suitcases in the back.”

He suddenly realized Kendel was there to move into a dormitory room.

“We started jumping up and down and screaming,” he said. “I was so happy.

“It was so good having family there with me, having someone there to talk with.”

Kendel agreed to go to ODU in part because her mother asked her to.

“My Mom didn’t want to have to go back and forth between Virginia Tech or Penn State and ODU,” Kris said. “She wanted us to go to the same school.”

Kendel said because of football and their schedules, she and Kris did not see each other enough.

“We saw each other every now and then,” she said. “We went to the same school, but it still felt distant.”

Perhaps, but Kris said he needed his sister’s support, for while he’s had much success as a player, personal losses took a toll on him.

Kris lost a cousin and then mourned the loss of others during his first few years at ODU. 

“Each loss was so hard on him,” Kendel said.

 But last year came the hardest blow of all – when his best friend, Kevin Irvin, was killed during a drive-by shooting last December in Richmond.

He and Irvin, nicknamed KJ, became close at Bird, where they played football together. They sat next to each other on national signing day and while Kris signed with ODU, Irvin signed with Fairmont State, a Division II school in West Virginia.

His death has deeply affected Kris, who wears a locket with Irvin’s photo on a necklace.

“We made so many memories together, countless memories,” Kris said. “He was a smart guy, smarter than me.

“He was part of the engineering program in high school.”

Irvin had moved home because he didn’t have a full scholarship to Fairmont.  “He didn’t have enough money to stay there,” Kris said. “He had come home and was working.”

“Losing KJ nearly broke him,” Kendel said of her brother. “It took him a long time but he managed to push through it.”

Offensive lineman Stephon Dubose-Bourne said all of the tragedy might have caused Kris “to go into another direction.

“But I think him being a God-fearing man kept him on the right track. He stayed with the right people and didn’t go in the wrong direction,” he said.

“He’s been through so much, and it’s made him a better person.”

“The thing you love about Kris,” said Blake Seiler, ODU’s defensive coordinator, “is that all of that adversity, all of that having to grow up fast, molded and shaped him into the man he is today.

“The ups and downs of football can be extreme at time. But I’ve never seen Kris have a bad day.

“He’s always working, always smiling. He always has good energy.”

Kris had some long discussions about life and Christianity with Seiler while he was mourning the loss of so many friends.

“You know something’s going go to wrong, at times things aren’t going to make sense and you need something to fall back on, to keep you going on the right path,” Seiler said.

“And Kris is a testament to that kind of Christian faith.”

 Kris had to work harder than your average player. He was thin as a rail when Seiler and Rahne saw him for the first time in person.

Although listed at 195 pounds, he was closer to 185.

Kris said he held his breath to look bigger than he was. “I tried to puff myself up, to look bigger,” Kris said with a smile. “Didn’t fool for them a second.”

“He was so thin,” Seiler said. “He was a basketball player.

“We talked to him and we all realized, it was going to take time for him to develop. He needed to work hard and had to be patient.

“To his credit, he’s worked very hard and been patient. He’s done everything that we’ve asked him to do.”

He redshirted as a freshman and quickly became a mainstay in the ODU weight room. Gradually, he began to fill out his ample frame with muscle. He played mostly on special teams as a redshirt freshman and started eight games as a sophomore.

Last season, he started all 12 games at defensive end and had 45 tackles, 10 ½ tackles for a loss and 5 ½ sacks. He was named a third-team All-Sun Belt choice.

Now almost 90 pounds heavier than the lanky guy who first walked into the ODU football offices in 2021, Kris will start at defensive end at Lane Stadium for an ODU defense that is third in the Sun Belt in scoring defense.

Irokansi said he not only has the size to play in the NFL, but the talent and drive.

"He can play in the pros," he said. "He needs to continue to get better this year. But he knows that and when he puts his mind to something, he rarely fails."

The Trinidad family has grown in the last 22 years. Kris and Kendel also have brothers Naseric Copeland and Jaden Isacc, and sister Novel West, who is a cheerleader at Lloyd Bird. 

“I’m so grateful that he went to ODU,” LaToya said. “It’s a good program, but more important than that is the fact that the coaches care about the players as much or more as they care about winning.

“They have cared about my son. They promised me they would take care of them and they have.”

Kris said when he faced temptations, he would think about the sacrifices his mother made.

“When we were kids, it was cool to do bad things among so many of my friends,” he said. “I tried my best to stay on the right track.

“Whenever I had a temptation, when it seemed like the easy way but the wrong way was where I was tempted to go, I prayed and God put this in my head: ‘But what would your Mom do?’

“She didn’t take the easy way. That would have been to give us up for adoption or to have an abortion. She took the hard way, to raise two children as a single Mom.

 “I have teammates that have children, and you know they struggle at times, and they are financially stable. She comes from nothing. She had nothing. And watching her do what she did for us, it’s just amazing.

“I love her and appreciate her so much. She’s my inspiration.”

Minium is ODU’s senior executive writer. Contact him at hminium@odu.edu or follow him on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram