Samantha Pell to become Washington Capitals beat reporter

Announcement from Sports Editor Matthew Vita and Sports Day Editor Matthew Rennie:

We are very excited to announce that Samantha Pell will be our new Washington Capitals beat reporter. Samantha replaces Isabelle Khurshudyan, who is moving to Foreign as a Moscow correspondent.

Covering the Capitals is nothing new for Samantha. She’s filled in for Isabelle at various points over the past two years and has been on the Caps beat full time since the start of the current season. She took over the beat in the winter of 2018 during Isabelle’s month-long assignment to Moscow, and was part of the team of Post reporters who covered the Caps’ Stanley Cup championship that spring. Samantha has already earned the trust and respect of the Capitals locker room and front office, and has proven to be a quick study of the game of hockey.

Samantha was an intern with The Post in 2017 and impressed us with her versatility and energy, which resulted in 93 bylines in nine weeks that summer. After a brief stint covering high school football with the Dallas Morning News, she returned to The Post in December 2017 as a full-time reporter covering high school sports. On the preps beat, Samantha did a skillful job of covering and developing sources within the D.C.-area high school basketball community, and became an authoritative voice on college recruiting -- often breaking the news of the college commitments of the region’s top prospects. She also wrote several nationally focused features, including pieces on mounting concern about knee injuries suffered by teenagers playing too much basketball and a decision by a high school wrestler in Colorado to forfeit a chance at a state championship because he did not want to wrestle a girl.

Samantha grew up outside Seattle. She graduated from the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University, where she attended Barrett, the university Honors College. Before coming to The Post, she interned at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and with the Associated Press in New York.