New Reporters for Sports

I am pleased to announce two new members of the Sports staff.

David Chen will join us as an investigative reporter. David brings lots of talents to the position. He is a critical digger, elegant writer and smart thinker. He sort of already started, with this fast-turnaround portrait of the former Yale women’s soccer coach implicated in the admissions cheating scandal. David, who has worked at The Times since 1995, comes to us from Metro, where his work forced the president of City College of New York to resign and yielded state and federal investigations (so leaders of sports organizations, watch yourselves). He knows his way around politics and government, too, having served as bureau chief at City Hall and in Trenton. David is a native of New Jersey and speaks it fluently, along with Mandarin. His daughters are athletes, a swimmer and a fencer, even though he has no aptitude in either sport. He likes to bike, ski and play tennis, but his one shining moment occurred when he lived in Asia and played center in pickup basketball. He will join us in early April.

Sopan Deb will join us an N.B.A. reporter, forming an awesome threesome with Marc Stein and Scott Cacciola. Some of you may be scratching your heads: Sopan passes through here so much to talk basketball that you might have thought he was on our staff already. Now, we will officially benefit from his insight and ideas. Sopan comes to us from Culture, where he has written about the intersection of politics and the arts. He still gets asked a lot about this news-breaking Q. and A. And more recently he has been at the forefront of the Jussie Smollett case. Sopan joined The Times in 2017 from CBS News, where he made a mark covering the Trump campaign.

He will join us in time for the N.B.A. playoffs in April.

— Randy