Tom Farrey is an Emmy Award-winning correspondent for ESPN and the author of Game On: The All-American Race to Make Champions of Our Children. Farrey’s work over the years has explored the connections between sport and the largest themes in society --education, globalization, technology, race and ethics, among others. He was one of seven journalists selected in 2007 among the "100 Most Influential Sports Educators in America" by the Institute for International Sport at the University of Rhode Island.

In 2011, Farrey also became director of the Aspen Institute's Sports & Society program, a vehicle for convening leaders and fostering dialogue around topics of critical importance. The program helps inspire solutions to major issues so that sport can best serve the public interest, starting with the health needs of children and communities.

Farrey joined ESPN in 1996 after eight years with The Seattle Times. His stories have appeared on the ESPN newsmagazines Outside the Lines and E:60, as well as SportsCenter, ESPN.com, ESPN The Magazine, and ABC's World News Tonight and Good Morning America. His work has won two Emmy awards for Outstanding Sports Journalism and top national honors from, among other organizations, Sigma Delta Chi/Society of Professional Journalists, the Asian American Journalists Association, the U.S. Basketball Writers Association and the Women’s Sports Foundation.

Honored as 2008 Sports Education Book of the Year, Game On is recognized by many as the leading journalistic work on contemporary youth sports. The book is a required text in university courses on more than a dozen campuses, from Oregon State to Michigan State to the University of Florida. As a featured speaker, he has been asked to share the book’s insights at the annual conferences for such groups as the American College of Sports Medicine, the U.S. Tennis Association, and the USA Coaching Coalition, whose partners include the U.S. Olympic Committee, NCAA and National Federation of State High School Associations.

As a journalist, his approach is to treat sports as a significant cultural force worthy of first-rate reporting -- while staying a step ahead of the national conversation. With E:60, Farrey introduced viewers to the cloning of race horses, the hidden public costs of the New York Yankees’ new $1.9 billion stadium project, and a sperm bank that sells the seed of college athletes. His powerful 2010 report on a college football player who suffered brain damage revealed the dangers of playing with a concussion. He has authored defining profiles of such prominent figures as mixed martial arts promoter Dana White, Olympic swimmer Dara Torres, and NASCAR prodigy Joey Logano. In 2007, Farrey told one of the more touching sports stories of the year, the return of a Lost Boy marathoner to the war-torn village in Sudan he left as a boy.

In 1999, Farrey was among the first journalists to report on the illegal flow of steroids from Mexico, with a hidden-camera investigation documenting the ease with which baseball players can buy the drugs from Tijuana pharmacies. Other reports on the topic of drugs and sports examined anti-aging doctors who give muscle-building hormones to injured pros, and the popularity of steroid precursors among high school athletes.

In 2001, Farrey’s exclusive report on the torture of Iraqi soccer players by Saddam Hussein’s son Uday, the nation’s top Olympic official, led to the disbanding of the Iraqi Olympic governing body by the International Olympic Committee. That year, Farrey also exposed Christopher Robin Academy, an obscure New York high school that dispensed bogus grades to basketball prospects so they could qualify for NCAA ball. His reporting revealed a loophole in the eligibility process for athletes, and the NCAA later moved to create a list of dubious schools. Both stories appeared on Outside the Lines, winning Emmy awards for journalism.

In 2004, Farrey presented a three-part Outside the Lines series on the corrupt business of recruiting and signing Dominican baseball prospects. The series discovered that the names and ages of teenagers were easily changed by unscrupulous street agents, and revealed how one major league team made a $100,000 side payment to a street agent to steer a future major league pitcher their way. He also found prospects who had died after injecting their bodies with animal compounds in an attempt to bulk up for tryouts with major league scouts. Farrey’s series won a Television Investigative Reporting award from Sigma Delta Chi/Society of Professional Journalists.

In 2008, former American League MVP Miguel Tejada was forced to change his age in official baseball records as a result of an E:60 report that he lied about his birth date throughout his major league career. The revelation came at a time when Tejada, who is two years older than he had claimed, was under federal investigation for lying to Congressional investigators about his knowledge of steroids—a charge to which he later plead guilty. The age discrepancy also meant the Houston Astros had acquired a shortstop who was 33, not 31, picking up the final two years of a six-year, $72 million contract that had been gained with false information. A top executive for the Baltimore Orioles, his previous team, said that club wouldn’t have given him that long of a contract if it knew the player’s true age.

Farrey has filed reports from Europe, Africa and Australia, as well as several countries in Latin America. His hour-long ESPN documentary “Witness to a Defection,” on Cuban baseball defectors, included an interview with future major league star Jose Contreras before he fled the country. In 2007, an E:60 investigation documented the illegal trafficking of a 14-year-old soccer star from Senegal to Portugal. For a futuristic look into the world of talent identification, Farrey went to Australia with a cheek swab to get his one-year-old son genetically screened for athletic traits; his ESPN The Magazine account served as the inspiration for Game On, published in May 2008 in hardback and August ‘09 in paperback.

At The Seattle Times, Farrey covered the NBA, NFL, and events including the Olympics, Super Bowl, and World Cup. In 1992, he and a fellow reporter broke the news of improper loans given to quarterback Billy Joe Hobert of the University of Washington football team, a report that led to NCAA sanctions including a bowl ban for the defending national champions. One of his Sunday magazine pieces, on prison basketball, was selected by John Feinstein for the annual anthology, Best American Sports Writing, and was identified by Booklist as the collection’s highlight that year.

His print reports also have appeared in Business Week, the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, St. Petersburg Times and the Miami Herald. He has lectured at many universities, moderated panels at gatherings such as the Aspen Ideas Festival, and in 2004 and ‘06 served as Master of Ceremonies at the National Youth Sports Awards sponsored by the Positive Coaching Alliance.

A native of Hollywood, Fla., and graduate of the University of Florida, Farrey now lives in Connecticut with his wife, Christine, and their three children, Cole, Anna and Kellen.