New Kensington native David Girardi living out Super Bowl dream with Chiefs

During the football season, David Girardi doesn’t see much sun.

He arrives at work in morning darkness and leaves well after the sun goes down. Tough duty, sure, but he embraces it like found gold.

This week, however, the sun is out — literally and figuratively. Girardi and his employers, the Kansas City Chiefs, will meet the San Francisco 49ers on Sunday in Super Bowl LIV in Miami. Girardi, who grew up in New Kensington, was an All-American quarterback at Geneva and coached at Seton Hill in Greensburg, is the Chiefs’ offensive quality control coach. He works closely with coach Andy Reid and Chiefs offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy. They draw up the gameplan, and Girardi puts it on paper for it to be installed for the players throughout the week.

“You have to love it,” he said Wednesday by phone from Miami while taking a break from game preparations. “We all get along. It makes the hours that much easier to work.”

Winning the AFC championship and advancing to the Super Bowl doesn’t hurt, either.

Girardi attended Valley through ninth grade when the family moved to St. Petersburg, Fla. He played at St. Petersburg Catholic, where his father, Frank, and brother, Mike, were assistants.

From there, he came back to Western Pennsylvania to play quarterback at Geneva, throwing for 5,997 yards and 37 touchdowns in 30 starts. He was a two-time National Christian College Athletic Association All-American and led Geneva to the NCCAA championship in 2009.

“David was a very special quarterback when he was here,” Geneva coach Geno DeMarco said. “I could see that he was a student of the game, and we spent a lot of time watching practice and game film.”

After graduation, Girardi realized one of football’s awful truths: Someday, it must end.

“When you’re young, you always want to play the game as long as you can,” he said. “You have visions of being a player (in the NFL). Then, you realize it’s not cut out for everybody. Then, what’s the next alternative?”

The logical step was a move into coaching.

At Geneva, DeMarco regularly allowed Girardi to change the play at the line of scrimmage, an exercise that prepared him for his career.

“It was an opportunity for me to learn the schemes of the game and what works best against different defenses,” Girardi said. “(DeMarco) giving me that flexibility and that freedom helped me a lot.

“We would meet and go through the gameplan from a strategy standpoint. I really enjoyed it. I knew then I wanted to get into coaching.”

His first job was as a graduate assistant at Seton Hill before returning to Geneva to coach quarterbacks.

“He was tremendous at preparing our quarterbacks,” DeMarco said.

Girardi received his first big break when he was hired as a quality control coach at Northwestern. There, he was on staff with Pitt defensive coordinator Randy Bates and current Chiefs quarterbacks coach Mike Kafka.

After six months in 2017 as the quarterbacks coach at Lafayette, Girardi picked up the phone one day and heard Reid’s voice. Kafka had recommended him for a quality control job with the Chiefs.

Part of Girardi’s duties include working with backup quarterback Matt Moore and making sure he is ready in the event Patrick Mahomes must come out of the game.

Girardi said working with Mahomes is “unbelievable.”

“He’s so talented, can make every throw you can think of. He’s a great leader, great person and comes to work every day and wants to be great.

“Who he is as a person we get to see on a daily basis, and that’s as impressive as his performance on Sunday.”

With family and friends in the stands, including brother Dom, the coach at Highlands, Girardi will be in the coaches’ booth Sunday at Hard Rock Stadium.

He is only 31, so his career already is on a fast track. This week, football is as much about bright lights and swarming media as it is finding a way to block 49ers defensive end Nick Bosa. But Girardi got his start at some of the lowest levels of college football. He said the change is striking in some ways but not as much as might be expected.

“A lot of things are external, as far as the changes, the limelight, the media, the number of fans at the game,” he said. “But a lot of the internal stuff, as far gameplanning and football being football, is the same. That’s what’s kind of neat about it.”