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Who is Kaelen Jones?
Kaelen Jones is a sports media professional with more than a decade of full-time content creation spanning various roles as a writer, producer, award-nominated podcast host, and consultant. He’s spent the bulk of his career covering sports, specializing in conversant feature writing and in-depth statistical and tactical analysis.
Kaelen leads with empathy and compassion, fundamentally making his work stand out in an industry that prizes shallowness in news-breaking and storytelling. His guiding light is revealing the humanity and texture of his subjects to share the deeper nuances of extraordinary individuals that make them relatable to all. He believes that his subjects’ gifts are an entry point into motivations and principles that can inspire others to achieve at a high level. He excels at finding beauty in the mundane and revealing the intangibles that connect readers with his subjects.
Career Background
While studying journalism at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communications (2014-18), Kaelen covered ASU athletics for SB Nation and 247Sports’ SunDevilSource. He then interned with Major League Baseball, covering the Los Angeles Angels (2017) and Dodgers (2018) for the league’s official site after his junior and senior years.
He cut his internship in 2018 short to join Sports Illustrated’s news desk, serving as a junior writer for a year. He wrote several feature stories, highlighted by an exclusive following NBA center Willie Cauley-Stein around a private Jean-Michel Basquiat exhibit in New York City and a chronicling of a day in the life of NBA analyst Jalen Rose at ESPN’s Seaport District studios. Additionally, Kaelen wrote a book review about a text surrounding the teachings of Mike Tyson’s trainer, Cus D’Amato, plus spoke with rapper Quavo about his perspective on the connection between hip-hop and basketball.
In 2019, Kaelen joined The Athletic to cover the University of Texas Longhorns’ legendary football program. In 2020, during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, he landed with The Ringer, the renowned sports and pop culture site, becoming its first Black full-time NFL and college football staff writer and podcaster. Kaelen profiled NCAA Football 14 cover star Denard Robinson ahead of the game’s announced revival and also penned a story identifying how the NFL’s “green dot” helmet sticker indicated a growing league-wide, on-field trend. He also wrote several stories surrounding the intersection of race and sports, including the negative draft discourse surrounding quarterback Justin Fields in 2021 and coach Brian Flores’ ouster from the Miami Dolphins in 2022. In addition to writing about football for The Ringer, Kaelen co-hosted weekly podcast episodes of The Ringer NFL Show, initially alongside Cole Wright and Ryan Shazier in 2020, then with Ben Solak and Steven Ruiz in 2021.
The HISTORY Channel hired Kaelen in May 2022 as the voice-over artist and story editor for Sports History This Week, a weekly narrative podcast that revisited historic sports moments in an audio documentary-style format. Notable episodes include interviews Kaelen conducted with several icons, such as Billie Jean King, Tony Hawk, Doug Williams, Greg Maddux, and Joey Chestnut. The show earned a 2023 Ambie nomination for “Best Sports Podcast” from The Podcast Academy, and peaked as the 20th most-listened-to sports podcast in the United States, at the time ahead of prominent sports talk shows such as ESPN’s First Take and Fox Sports’ The Herd with Colin Cowherd.
Kaelen was featured in the HISTORY Channel documentary, Jim Thorpe: Lit by Lightning, directed by Chris Eyre, which premiered in July 2025.
After covering the 2023 NFL and college football season for The Messenger (shuttered in January 2024), Kaelen freelanced, briefly hosting a YouTube show for DAZN, working on the Action Network’s newsdesk, and writing a story about how breakdancing earned a place at the 2024 Olympics for The Royal Academy of Dance’s official magazine, Dance Gazette (Issue 10).
In May 2024, Kaelen became an Associate Producer for Netflix’s UNTOLD, the groundbreaking anthology sports documentary series. As part of the Propagate Content production house, Kaelen joined the core UNTOLD team at the tail end of production for episodes surrounding Hope Solo and Steve McNair. His role increased for films surrounding Lamar Odom, Rasheed Wallace & the Portland “Jail Blazers,” and other upcoming movies.
