Stephen Noh Never Folded His Basketball Writing Dream

College Decision

Just like most kids in Chicago, Noh was always shooting hoops. He started playing around the same time that he started watching Bulls games on a serious level.

“I would play every single day,” said Noh. “It snowed a lot. So I would shovel our driveway and shoot around for at least half an hour every day until I went to college. I love basketball so much, even though I really wasn’t that great.”

Noh’s dedication to the game continued, but unfortunately, all of those hours spent shooting hoops in the driveway didn’t result in a spot on his high school team. The New Trier High School basketball team was stacked. All of the starters went on to play Division I college basketball.

Noh may have been a step behind his peers on the court, but that was not the case in the classroom. He graduated high school as a straight-A student. That meant his options for college were vast, so when it came down to where he would go to complete his education, the decision was simple.

“I wanted to avoid the miserable winters, said Noh. “California is a really cool state. I live in Atlanta, Georgia, right now, and I always joke with my wife, let’s move to California, because I think it’s awesome, and it was awesome. So I went to U.C. Berkeley, because it’s a good school in California.”

Unlikely Path

Noh attended U.C. Berkeley from 2002-05, earning his bachelor’s degree in political science in just three years. Due to the lack of exposure to sports journalism opportunities, he didn’t go all in on journalism. Long before there was TikTok, Instagram, and all these content creation platforms, this was the case in sports, which was the only area Noh was interested in pursuing.

After graduating in 2005, there was no blueprint on what Noh would do next. He began teaching English abroad, in South Korea, which led to his returning home to teach at tutoring centers in Chicago. This lasted a year before he shifted his focus, this time into volunteer work.

At AmeriCorps, he did a lot of random things, helping in as many ways as he could, showing his compassionate personality for other individuals.

“I did Habitat for Humanity, working in construction, rebuilding houses after Hurricane Katrina,” said Noh “[I did] a lot of construction. I learned electrician skills. I did firefighting in California. I did trail building and a lot of natural resources areas. I helped get rid of invasive species in forests. I did a lot of random things in 2007.”

Volunteering and helping have always been a huge part of Noh’s life. Dating back to high school, he’s always made time to help people. That’s why he said yes to this interview; he just has it in his DNA to help people.

First Writing Job

Stephen Noh’s desire to help others also goes back to when he tried to get the Chicago Tribune job.

“I wanted to get those three or four jobs as a beat reporter in Chicago,” Noh said. “I had no idea how to do it. I had no connections. I cold emailed every single credentialed media person whose contact information I could find. None of them responded to me, except for Sam Smith. He’s awesome and sent me a very nice email.

“I remember how hard it was for me to break into the industry, so I don’t want anyone else to repeat that. So it’s always been a part of my attitude to help people when I can.”

A man of many trades, during college, teaching abroad, and volunteering with AmeriCorps, Noh was also playing poker on the side. He has always loved the competition and thrill of playing games since he was a kid. He enjoyed playing board games and card games so much because he saw a correlation between the two.

Basketball Is a Game

“That’s kind of the genesis of why I like playing basketball,” he said. “You can tell a lot about someone by the way they play basketball. The same is true for the way they play poker. You need to figure out the line between aggression and recklessness. I think that may be why there is a decent crossover of people who enjoy both games.”

Noh found himself to be pretty good at poker. Not only did he end up making a lot of money playing the game, but it would also open up to him his first real shot at becoming a journalist, a dream he never let go of. It might not have been covering basketball or the Bulls, but it was a step in the right direction.

“There was a site called Poker News,” Noh said. “Right now, it’s by far the biggest poker news website around. But, at the time, I think they only had like three or four employees. So, I moved to Las Vegas and decided I was going to be a professional poker player. In order to give myself less risk, I decided to get a side job writing for Poker News.”

Getting Noticed

Not having any journalistic training, Noh had to teach himself how to be a successful journalist. He had to learn how to record, how to transcribe quotes, and how to write things into a story. Whether that was going up to poker players and asking if he could interview them, or teaching himself how to write from the ground up, he taught himself.

He would do this for about a year, making too much money playing poker to pass up on playing full-time. Noh would stop writing about poker and solely focus on playing. It felt wrong to him, though. He was starting to feel like he wasn’t helping anybody, so he stopped in 2011.

“I was getting a little bit disillusioned,” Noh said. “Poker is pretty cutthroat, and it’s a selfish endeavor. You’re not really contributing to society in any way. So in 2011, I signed up for another year of AmeriCorps. I went to New Orleans and started volunteering again. I went back to rebuild houses that were destroyed in Hurricane Katrina.”

While he did stop writing about poker, Noh never let his dream die of one day writing about basketball as a beat writer, particularly with the Bulls.

Never Giving Up on the Bulls

Since the early 2000s, BlogaBull has been a huge site on SBNation. It has since been moved to a SubStack element, but during its SBNation days, it was super popular. It covered everything from Joakim Noah as a point guard to the Zach LaVine era. Noh kept up on it, was a frequent reader, and always made sure to put his sense in on everything Bulls.

“I was commenting frequently on that site,” Noh said. “I was writing long essays, arguing with random people on the internet. I looked at these comments and thought to myself this is almost like an article; I should just publish. They had a section where you could publish your own fan articles. So, I started publishing. That was during the Derrick Rose era, when he won MVP.”

At the time, the site manager, Matt Barnhart, would actually seek out Noh and tell him his articles were very good and that he wanted him to write for the front page of his site. It was usually an unpaid site, but Noh did so well that BlogaBull Matt gave him $50 out of his own pocket. Noh was putting in work and doing an awesome job.

“The good thing about that was it may have been an unpaid position, but I was making money on the side playing poker. You know, a lot of people don’t have that; they don’t have the ability to do that. A lot of people were reading that site at the time, and it gave me a lot of exposure. This led to my first paid gig with the Athletic.”

Mount Rushmore of the Athletic

In 2016, Noh became just the fourth writer to join The Athletic. In addition, he was the only basketball writer. It was around the time that ESPN Chicago got shut down. The Athletic would hire all the All-Star writers from ESPN Chicago, including an up-and-coming writer, Stephen Noh.

His lifelong dream was being fulfilled; to become a beat writer for an NBA team.

“We were kind of laughed at,” Noh said. “Nobody thought this idea would work. Nobody thought that people would pay for news. The reason why it worked, in my opinion, was that our stuff was really good. Our stuff was different and good. All four of us were putting in insane hours. I was making $1,500 a month and putting in 60 hours a week in the first year I was there.”

If it wasn’t for the pandemic, Noh might still be working for the Athletic. They cut everyone who was not a full-time employee, in addition to full-time employees. It was truly a brutal time in the industry. The only thing that was going on basketball-related was the Bulls documentary.

But just because basketball stopped mostly for the world, it didn’t stop for Noh.

Breakthrough

“I pivoted to writing independently,” Noh stated. “I would start a Bulls Newsletter on SubStack. I was surprised that I got such a good response from that endeavor. I think I built my following to over 1500 subscribers. That SubStack got me hired at Sporting News and I’m still there.”

Noh was able to shift his focus from what’s happening as an analyst to actual stories and features on players. He was also able to shift his focus completely to writing, quitting his long tenured poker run.

Still at Sporting News, he’s thriving covering all 30 NBA teams and able to go in-depth on what’s interesting about the players that entertain us fans. A recent story he did on superstar guard Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, after the MVP and champion was named Male Athlete of the Year, emphasized this concept. 

“I got to talk to his dad, teammates, and trainers,” Noh said. “It’s interesting, he definitely wants to be in the MJ conversation. He is really thinking about his legacy. Not game after game or year after year, he’s talking about legacy. He studies MJ videos, and he tries to incorporate his fadeaway in games.”

Reflecting on a Successful Career

Noh successfully made it as an NBA media member, and he did it his way — interviewing Joakim Noah, Tim Legler, and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander’s camp. He’s developed an amazing ability to diagnose plays and explain why the player does what he may do, which he learned on his own by watching YouTube videos. He has a multitude of skill sets, he’s going to All-Star games and NBA finals, and he’s living his childhood dream.

Noh might not have taken the conventional path, but all of these experiences have shaped him into the man he is today and given him the basketball mind he has today.

“The reason I was able to get to where I am today is that I was not afraid of failing and taking huge risks,” Noh said.

“I did take risks, and I did fail, but repeatedly putting yourself out there is really important. I also think that a lot of people make the mistake of trying to be someone else. You have to take pieces from everybody, but most of all just learn about yourself and what you’re good at.”