56: David Kitchen
Source: Edge Leadership Academy
About David
David Kitchen is the Founder and President of Edge Leadership Academy. Coach Kitch, as he is known by his athletes, is a former Division 1 Coach and has a decade of experience building leaders, culture, and mindset at the highest levels of sports and business.
Born in Harrisburg, PA and raised in the coal country region of northeastern Pennsylvania, David was raised by a single mom. Although he never met his biological dad and didn’t have a male role model growing up, he became the man of the house at the young age of 11.
As a kid, David was always outside, playing football, baseball, kickball, riding skateboards, and doing anything else active as his escape from reality. But his real solace was the weight set his stepfather got for him. He would do reps of the few exercises he knew until his arms were numb, and he loved it.
When his stepfather left the family, he took what savings David’s mom had left, leaving her in financial ruin. This was when David’s grandmother stepped in, whisking his family from their apartment above a bar in the middle of town to her home in the countryside, with their closest neighbors a mile away.
This was the best thing to ever happen to David. As his mom went back to school, his grandmother introduced structure into their lives, taming the wild children and showing them what true leadership looked like.
David describes his hometown as the kind of place featured in the movie Friday Night Lights, with signs in town touting the trifecta of God, Family, Football. Being a larger kid obsessed with weights, David played high school ball in front of 12,000 people every weekend. He was heavily recruited as a junior but after blowing his knee, had to settle for a small school in PA after the other offers dried up.
He ended up graduating with a business degree, selling IT systems right out of college. He was good at it but he hated it and when a friend offered him a head coaching position at a local high school, David recognized the divine intervention, left his sales job, and went all in on coaching.
This newfound sense of responsibility gave him fuel for his next step, which was writing letters to every D1 college on the east coast, offering to work in the weight room for free, and Robert Morris University gave him a shot. David quit his job, packed his belongings, and drove to Pittsburgh to start the next chapter of his life.
David’s next big shot came at the age of 25, when he got an offer to be the assistant director of football training at UNLV. This was the opportunity of a lifetime but David was ready. He ended up spending three years strength and conditioning with both football and basketball programs at multiple schools.
Fast forward to 2020. As David and his Georgia Southern basketball team were getting ready to board a plane to head to March Madness, the pandemic shut everything down. They returned to campus to find out that the head coach was offered another job. So, it was time for David to make his next move.
Fortunately for the many lives he would come to impact, his next move was founding the Edge Leadership Academy, which works with athletes and companies to build leaders and take performance to the next level.
David is the author of The Pyramid: A System for Building Tomorrow's Leaders Today, and The Scoreboard: A Self-Audit System to Help You Build the Life You Want.
It’s a far cry from his days as a loose cannon kid in Pennsylvania’s coal country. But that’s David answering the question he now asks his students: “what if you went all in?”