The first time Zack Fitzgerald got Kashawn Aitcheson on the ice five years ago, he popped a kid in the corner.
It was a skills session in Toronto with On Point Hockey and he was skating with kids like Sam Dickinson and Beckett Sennecke who, at the time, were the best 2006s in minor hockey and destined to be top-10 picks in the OHL draft.
Aitcheson wasn’t that. He’d become a third-round pick of the Barrie Colts.
After he introduced himself to the skate in that corner, Fitzgerald, a journeyman tough guy during his own pro career, looked at one of the other coaches on the ice and said “OK, he’s got it. He’s got that extra.”
Years later, Dickinson and Sennecke were taken in the first round of the 2024 NHL Draft. A year after that, Aitcheson will join them as a first-rounder in the 2025 draft.
Now he’s one of them.
Once you understand Aitcheson and his story, you can tell why.
“I think the best type of stories are when you’re not necessarily in the spotlight and you just keep working at it,” Fitzgerald said. “He just kept working at it.”
Kashawn Aitcheson was a third-round pick of the Barrie Colts in 2022. (Josh Kim / Barrie Colts)
When Paul Capizzano and Dylan Liptrap of Quartexx Management began working with Aitcheson in his minor midget season with the North York Rangers, they told him, “OK, Kashawn, you might have to play a year or two of Tier II in Stouffville.”
“No, no, don’t worry about it, I’ll be in Barrie this year for sure,” he replied.
Capizzano had first seen him play in Bantam, kept finding himself thinking “You know what, there’s something with this kid,” and kept going back. After seeing him again at Scotiabank Pond just before and after Christmas, Capizzano then spoke to his coach and he and Liptrap decided to get on him.
In the player, they saw a rawness — they still say he’s “very much raw now.”
Once they got to know the kid, they saw that “don’t worry about it, I’ll deal with it” attitude and a “ton of personality.”
“He talks more than I do, and that’s hard to do,” Capizzano said on a phone call earlier this year, laughing.
Atif Khedri has also seen that personality since Aitcheson first walked into his gym, AK Fitness Studio in the Don Mills neighborhood of Toronto, at 13 years old.
Aitcheson was raised in the Scarborough beaches on the east side of the city, supported by his grandparents and his uncle Chris, who played Jr. A and Division III NCAA hockey. He was introduced to Khedri by another one of his clients, Christopher Brown, after Brown found him by chance because his mom worked next to the gym.
In 15 years of working with athletes — including Nik Antropov and his son Danil, Artem Guryev, Akil Thomas and Brett Neumann — he says he’s never met a more humble, hardworking kid than Aitcheson. But it was the personality he noticed first. It always is with Aitcheson, who those around him call “Kash.”
“He’s very charismatic and very energetic,” Khedri said. “The first day when he came in he was very polite. He was respectful. And those are the characteristics that I told him to keep on working on because that will make him an athlete that is more than just talent. Personality is something that you can’t teach people, unfortunately.”
Though Aitcheson wasn’t the most skilled hockey player in his group with Khedri when he first started working out at his gym, he “constantly pushed himself beyond his limits.”
“He was definitely always ready to go and he had more reason for excuses than a lot of the young kids that I work with,” Khedri said. “Some of them are very privileged. He never took it for granted. … And every year he got better, whether it was getting faster or jumping higher or lifting heavier. (And) his grandfather, Chris and his grandma, they pretty much trusted his career in my hands.”
Pictured left: Aitcheson and Atif Khedri after winning gold at U18 worlds. Pictured right: Aitcheson doing a 450-pound deadlift. (Photos courtesy Atif Khedri).
Once the Colts got their hands on him, they quickly saw the same qualities Fitzgerald and Khedri had seen before them. When Colts general manager and head coach Marty Williamson picked him in the third round in 2022, they knew “he had real competitive fire.”
But they didn’t know “just how tough he was” or that “he’d be an impact hitter with older guys.”
And so he showed them, popping a few more guys in his first camp in Barrie to surprise his way onto the Colts as a 16-year-old, skipping Jr. A like he’d told his agents he would.
“He has this unique ability to explode into people and knock them down,” Williamson said. “If we’d have known the full package he probably wouldn’t have been a third-round pick, he would have been a first-round pick. But the good thing for him is he has gone from raw to a player very quickly. Where sometimes it takes multiple years for guys who are raw to kind of refine their game, he has been able to do it very quickly.”
That first year, he also had the attitude of “I know I’m not going to play but it’s fine, I’ll practice and get better every day,” a pill the kids who’ve always been at the top can’t always swallow.
That quick development was then really punctuated last year in his second season with the Colts. Aitcheson registered 39 points (tops among Colts defensemen) and 126 penalty minutes in 64 games in Barrie, playing his way onto Team Canada for U18 worlds.
Still, though Williamson thought he had a “great year” and Aitcheson was just excited to be considered for the under-18 team, Williamson and Aitcheson both thought he’d be a No. 7 D for them — and Williamson thinks Hockey Canada thought the same.
He then led Team Canada in ice time in the medal round, averaging nearly 24 minutes per game in the quarterfinal, semifinal and gold medal game.
“He morphed into an impacting guy and I remember talking to (head coach) Gardiner (MacDougall) and he just goes ‘I just love the kid,’” Williamson said.
Some of Aitcheson’s progression has also happened in twice-a-week trips from Scarborough to Bradford with skating coach Paul Matheson — a drive of up to an hour and a half each way, which Matheson called “insane.”
Matheson, who is also the Colts’ skating coach, said it only took him telling Aitcheson once that he could benefit from working on his skating for him to go all in on it.
At 16, “everything he did was sloppy” according to Matheson, who’d get on him about how loose his upper body was, and how “he was basically kind of winging it.”
“I was really trying to get him to be aware and skate with more structure, so his upper body is more proactively placed in good positions,” Matheson said.
Aitcheson embraced the challenge and would often ask Matheson after a game, “How is it? Does it look better?”
Through last season and into their summer together post-U18s, Matheson started to tell him that it had really come around, sending him more positive clips of video than negative.
Today, though they’re still trying to build more pop into his crossovers and a little more launch and depth across the ice, “the technique is now in place” because of Aitcheson’s willingness to put in the work.
“He’s a good athlete, and if you’re a good athlete you can do things that other guys can’t get away with. He was getting away with it but it was going to be limiting at some point. He skates with much more structure now,” Matheson said. “His stride is much better now, he doesn’t sway back and forth and his arm swing is much better. … I just really enjoy working with the kid because he really wants to get better and he’s driven.”
Aitcheson put plenty of work into improving his play with the Colts. (Josh Kim / Barrie Colts)
Beyond the work he has put into his skating with Matheson, his game with Williamson and the Colts, his strength with Khedri (he’s now 6-foot-1.5 and 196 pounds), and his skill with Fitzgerald, he has also worked with skills coach Leland de Langley over the last couple of summers.
de Langley, who works with a long list of NHL players and prospects, talks about Aitcheson as “a wicked kid” and a “hell of a player who has that bite, and that leadership, and plays with an exuberance that a lot of kids don’t.”
“He’ll never cheat you energy. When kids like that have that personality and it shows in their style of play, it actually brings up their level, similar to a Marchand or a Tkachuk where they’re just always around it and doing things whether for good,” de Langley said, laughing, “or bad.”
And that ‘bad’ isn’t the negative kind with Aitcheson, according to De Langley, Williamson, Matheson, Fitzgerald and Khedri. It’s a badness on the ice. It’s all of the pop he gives, not just in those powerful hits Williamson talked about, but in a willingness — nay, eagerness — to drop the gloves (which he has done repeatedly in the OHL even as they’ve clamped down on it, and did at this year’s CHL-USA Prospects Challenge) and a desire to be feared by his opponents (many of whom use his name when asked about the hardest player to play against).
“He’s that player that you hate playing against but you love on your team,” Fitzgerald said. “He’s going to come out and he’s going to rub you out in the corner and then smile at you after.”
The badness — meanness, toughness, call it what you want — is something Aitcheson said has always been a part of his DNA. It also comes from playing two other very physical sports growing up: lacrosse and football (he was a running back in the latter).
“I’ve always wanted to get involved and be physical. Even when there was no hitting I think I’d take 2-3 penalties a game lining kids up,” he told The Athletic before a Colts game earlier this year, smiling. “I think I’m a strong, physical two-way defenseman that likes to shut down other teams’ top players and contribute offensively. I sort of envision myself as a Charlie McAvoy/Mikhail Sergachev type of player. Super physical. Super good defensively. But also when the team needs it I can put the puck in the net offensively.”
He has proven the latter this season — his 41 points in 50 games rank second among draft-eligible OHL defensemen, he runs one of the Colts’ power plays and he’s about to break the rare 20-goal mark.
He now “has the ability to impact the game in many different ways every night,” according to Williamson.
Said Williamson: “We’re starting to see these defensemen that are extremely offensive or extremely defensive, and he has this kind of crossover ability where he’s big and tough and he can play defense, but he also has offense to his game and he’s dangerous on the power play for us and doing offensive things. But it hasn’t deterred from his identity, which I think is a pretty rugged defenseman that is hard to play against.”
Aitcheson is more than willing to drop the gloves. (Josh Kim / Barrie Colts)
Ask Aitcheson when it clicked for him — when he realized he could get here, to first-rounder and NHL Central Scouting’s No. 15-ranked North American skater — and he just shakes his head. He always did.
It wasn’t making the Colts, or U18 worlds, or during his excellent draft year this year.
It all goes back to that answer he gave Capizzano and Liptrap.
“I had a bit of delusion,” he said. “I don’t think there was ever a time I didn’t think I had a chance at it. That’s been a big part of my story, just a little kid dreaming big. And then when you put the hard work with it, I think it’ll still work out.”
In that way, this has all been his doing. That doesn’t mean people like Khedri, Matheson, Fitzgerald, de Langley, Capizzano, Liptrap, Williamson and others haven’t had an impact. He’ll tell you about the work Matheson has done with him on his skating, how much he loves his one-on-one time with Khedri in the gym, and the outsized role his grandparents and his uncle Chris have had on him.
“(Chris) was a big part of my falling in love with hockey because I’d go to all of his games and see the way he played with a grittier style. He was a big influence on my career,” Aitcheson said.
Some of those people will credit his family, too.
“I know his grandfather really well. His grandfather is a great, great dude, always there for him, has done so much for him and put him in the places that he has needed to be and always had his corner,” Fitzgerald said.
But they always come back to him.
“I think he recognized the opportunity that he had in front of him, especially seeing all of the kids around him being touted and coming back every summer to skate with those guys,” Fitzgerald said. “He’s not messing around off of the ice, he has surrounded himself with good people, and he has just kept his head on straight and worked hard and has always been asking questions and always wanting to know what he can do better and always wanting to push it so that he has the best chance.”
Last summer, Khedri said everyone in his gym was like, “What is going on with this kid? He’s like a beast.”
“Yep, that’s the attitude of a real professional athlete who wants to become better day by day,” Khedri would tell them.
Aitcheson also decided to stick with the small circle he surrounded himself with. Khedri insisted he could have gone to bigger trainers and that he had opportunities to train with NHL stars under revered coaches like Gary Roberts and Matt Nichol.
“(But) he didn’t want to get sidetracked,” Khedri said. “That speaks volumes about him. That shows to me that he appreciates the people that have helped him get this far. He doesn’t think he climbed it himself. He knows there are people behind him who’ve supported him.”
It’s also Aitcheson who Williamson says he’s lucky to coach — and who Williamson gave a letter to this year. He calls him an outstanding teammate who is very coachable and doesn’t let things go to his head.
“Kash is just one of those guys where there’s no bad days,” Williamson said. “My first guy that I felt lucky with was Bryan Little and Kash is just another one of those guys where it’s an awfully fun three, four years to be able to work and help develop him for his dreams.”
And maybe most importantly, as Matheson put it, “He’s different than what you see on the ice.”
“On the ice, usually by the end of the game, the other team does not like him very much. And if he’s on the road, usually the other crowd doesn’t like him very much,” Matheson said, chuckling. “But if you spend even five minutes talking to him, I don’t know how you cannot like him.”
(Top photo of Kashawn Aitcheson: Josh Kim / Barrie Colts)
