Jeremy Schaap

An ESPN reporter since 1996, Jeremy Schaap functions in a variety of roles at the network. He is a correspondent for E:60, the host of ESPN Radio’s The Sporting Life and a frequent contributor to Outside the Lines, NFL Countdown and College Gameday. His reports, interviews and commentaries are regularly featured on SportsCenter.

Schaap has won multiple national Sports Emmy Awards and many other honors for his work, including a national Edward R. Murrow Award, in 2012, and a National Headliner Award, in 2007. He is the author of Cinderella Man, a New York Times bestseller, and Triumph: The Untold Story of Jesse Owens and Hitler’s Olympics. In December 2013, Disney secured the movie rights to Triumph and enlisted Schaap for a consulting role on the film.

His best-known stories at ESPN include a Bobby Fischer profile, which earned him the national Sports Emmy Award for writing, an award named for his father Dick Schaap, and an investigation that took him to Serbia in search of a basketball player accused of a brutal assault, which earned him the national Sports Emmy Award for journalism.

It was also Schaap who conducted the first interview with Bob Knight after he was fired by Indiana University in 2000. In the New York Post, Phil Mushnick called the interview, which turned confrontational, “A slam dunk… one that should be stored in the annals of sports broadcast journalism.”

It was Schaap, too, who conducted the first interviews with Darryl Strawberry, then with the New York Yankees, after he was diagnosed with colon cancer; with Plaxico Burress of the New York Giants, after he shot himself in a New York City nightclub; and with Manti Te’o, the Notre Dame linebacker, after it was reported that his supposed girlfriend had never existed.

In February 2003, Schaap broke the story of a pattern of misconduct by the University of Georgia’s basketball coaching staff. The investigation led to Georgia’s withdrawal from the SEC and NCAA tournaments and the departure of head coach Jim Harrick. John Jackson of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote, “The report was the kind of first-rate reporting rarely seen on TV. Jeremy Schaap’s reporting was fair and balanced.”

In 2001, Schaap was honored by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism for his two-part story on a white Florida high school football coach whose use of a racial epithet sparked a local furor. In 2006, Schaap received the annual journalism award of the National Association for Multi-Ethnicity in Communications, for a story on the Morgan State lacrosse team, the only lacrosse team ever fielded by a historically black college. And in 2011, Schaap was honored by the United Nations with a special commendation for a report on so-called corrective rape, the sexual attacks committed against lesbians in South Africa.

Schaap’s charitable endeavors include longstanding relationships with the ALS Association, whose annual sports awards dinner he emcees, and the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation of America, which has honored him with its Lifetime Achievement Award.

In addition to his contributions for ESPN The Magazine and ESPN.com, Schaap’s work has appeared in The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, Time, The Wall Street Journal and Parade.

Born August 23, 1969, Schaap is a native of New York City and a 1991 graduate of Cornell University.