Welcome to my personal website.

I am currently a national staff writer at The Athletic where I cover the WNBA and women’s college basketball. Previously, I worked four years at Sports Illustrated where I primarily covered women’s basketball as well as contributed to our NBA coverage. While at SI, I additionally wrote enterprise stories about MLB, men’s college basketball, surfing and lacrosse, and took part in the site’s football coverage as well. My work has been featured in magazine editions of Sports Illustrated as well as in Sports Illustrated for Kids. I also appeared as front-facing talent on SI video platforms, providing commentary on stories I reported as well as analysis of general NBA topics of the day.

In an initial capacity at SI, I produced original video series for SI.com and SI’s social media platforms. I produced daily social videos on the sports news of the day  — videos from our small team receive more than 10,000,000 views monthly — and have worked on SI’s daily web show, “SI Now.”

Before coming to SI, I interned at CNN Sports in Atlanta where I helped to write and produce stories for various CNN platforms and for CNN.com. At CNN, I contributed original enterprise reporting features for CNN.com and helped gather editorial for both CNN digital and television platforms. I also edited a digital series on cross-fit and helped produce daily Bleacher Report TV segments. In May of 2018, I graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with honors in both journalism and history.

Previously, I was the sports editor and men’s basketball beat writer at the Daily Cardinal, UW-Madison’s premier independent student newspaper.  I love to write human-interest stories that go beyond the box score. At the Daily Cardinal, I did just that while also covering events like the NCAA basketball tournament, Milwaukee Bucks training camp and the Big Ten football championship.

I was also a fellow at the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Journalism Ethics, where I wrote stories about journalism practices and ethics by interviewing practicing journalists and academics. I have also worked for various sports blogs.

At Wisconsin, I was awarded the James L. Baughman Undergraduate Excellence Award given to graduating journalism school seniors. I was also awarded the Joseph Sicherman Award Scholarship recognizing students concentrating on editorial journalism and the Steven Mark Wiltgen and Betty J Frazier Scholarship recognizing students pursuing sports journalism.

You can contact me at benpickman@yahoo.com. You can follow me on Twitter at @benpickman. You can connect with me on Linkedin.