Mike Kitts begins his ninth season with the Warriors, his second as the Senior Vice President of Partnerships. Kitts, promoted to his current position on September 30, 2019, served as vice president of corporate partnerships for the three seasons prior to that. In his current role, Kitts oversees the Warriors’ sales, development, and insight teams, and he is responsible for all strategy and revenue which includes all of the company-owned properties – Golden State Warriors (NBA), Chase Center, Santa Cruz Warriors (G League), Golden Guardians (League of Legends) and Warriors Gaming Squad (NBA 2K League). Kitts is also tasked with providing the vision and execution for the team’s long-term planning for Chase Center, the Warriors’ state-of-the-art sports and entertainment complex located in San Francisco’s Mission Bay neighborhood. Under Kitts’ guidance, the organization has created a Founding Partnership program for Chase Center which includes top-brands including Accenture, Adobe, Google Cloud, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Kaiser Permanente, Oracle, PepsiCo, Rakuten, RingCentral, Ticketmaster, United Airlines and Verizon, along with naming rights partner JPMorgan Chase. This past season, the Warriors once again led the league in corporate partnership revenue.
In 2017, Kitts led the organization’s efforts tied to the NBA’s inaugural jersey badge program, which resulted in a league leading partnership with Japanese ecommerce giant Rakuten. With this notable partnership and others, the Warriors have been consistently recognized as one of the top teams in the NBA in several categories in revenue performance, including corporate partnership account growth, account performance and category performance.
Kitts’ resume includes over 15 years of marketing and sports experience, with stints at Learfield Sports, a sports marketing firm, and the San Diego Sports Commission, where he served as Director of Business Development.
The San Diego native earned his bachelor’s degree in business management at Lynn University and his MBA from the sports management program at San Diego State University. He received the honor of “Distinguished Alumni of the Year” at both universities.