He is a regular contributor to Nightline and ABC World News Tonight and has been published in Sports Illustrated, ESPN The Magazine, Time, Parade, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.

A native and resident of New York City, Schaap is the author of Cinderella Man: James J. Braddock, Max Baer, and the Greatest Upset in Boxing History (Houghton Mifflin, ISBN 0-618-55117-4), a New York Times best-seller, and Triumph: The Untold Story of Jesse Owens and Hitler's Olympics.

Schaap is the son of the late journalist and broadcaster Dick Schaap. Like his father, Schaap is an alumnus of Cornell University and a former editor of The Cornell Daily Sun. Schaap was also a member of the Quill and Dagger society. He won the Dick Schaap Award for Outstanding Writing at the 2005 Emmys, an award named after his father, for an Outside the Lines feature titled "Finding Bobby Fischer." Schaap and his wife have one child, a daughter.