An award-winning writer/reporter for ESPN, Hallie Grossman joined in 2011 as an editor and researcher for ESPN The Magazine, and then started writing in 2016. She has covered a wide variety of sports, including the NFL and college football, MMA, soccer, basketball and more. She focuses on longform features and profiles as part of ESPN’s digital enterprise group.
In 2026, her in-depth profile on WNBA star Sophie Cunningham was one of the most-read and shared pieces on ESPN.com of the year. Among other sports figures she has written features on: football players Saquon Barkley, Jared Goff, Fernando Mendoza and Trevor Lawrence; boxer Katie Taylor and Nebraska women’s volleyball head coach Dani Busboom Kelly. She also has written about the successful Oklahoma softball program, and one of her favorite pieces was a story on Dartmouth football and then-coach Buddy Teevens.
Grossman was awarded the 2026 Jenkins Medal for Best Sportswriting by the University of Texas Center for Sports Communication and Media for her deep dive on the Philly roots of WBB player/coach/legend Dawn Staley. As she is originally from the Philadelphia area, that was also one of her favorite pieces to research and write.
Other awards earned during her time at ESPN include the 2018 Newswomen’s Club of New York’s Front Page Award for specialized reporting (sports) and the 2019 Folio: Eddie Award for single article (sports/recreation) in recognition for her work, “Equal Fights Movement,” a longform story that examined the complicated world of intergender wrestling, while exploring the intersection of sports and entertainment with gender and gender-based violence.
Social and cultural issues have played a prominent role in Grossman’s work: ESPN The Magazine published her story on the journey of Saadiq Mohammed, a Somali soccer player who escaped the daily violence of life in Mogadishu, then found himself mired in the landscape of immigration and asylum in the United States.
As an editor, she focused primarily on college football and oversaw a 135-page special-print publication for two college football seasons. In her researching capacity, she was responsible for ensuring the accuracy and integrity of some of The Magazine’s most complicated, hard-hitting stories, including investigations into Cuban baseball players’ defections and the abusive culture fostered by one women’s soccer team owner, for which she was honored with ESPN’s Standing O award.
She was a political science and Spanish major at Penn State. While a student there, she was a reporter for The Daily Collegian and a member of the Schreyer Honors College. After graduation, she worked in public relations for four years in New York City before switching to journalism and joining ESPN.
Grossman is an avid reader and says she is “addicted” to The New York Times crossword puzzle, once completing 2,025 solved puzzles even while covering the 2020 Super Bowl and giving birth to her daughter Emma in 2022. -30-