Parsing XML using curl returning null

The only issue I had with your code was that not defining a user-agent would give me error 403 to access the feed.

In the future, you could use curl_getinfo to extract the status code of the request to ensure it didn't failed and further match it against code 200, which means OK.

$httpcode = curl_getinfo($curl, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);

Aside from that a few mistakes within your loops.

With SimpleXML:

<?php
$url = "https://thehockeywriters.com/category/san-jose-sharks/feed/";

$curl = curl_init();
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; WOW64; rv:17.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/17.0");
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
$data = curl_exec($curl);
$httpcode = curl_getinfo($curl, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);
curl_close($curl);

if ($httpcode !== 200)
{
    echo "Failed to retrieve feed... Error code: $httpcode";
    die();
}

$feed = new SimpleXMLElement($data);
// list all titles...
foreach ($feed->channel->item as $item)
{
    echo $item->title, "<br>\n";
}

With DOMDocument:

<?php
$url = "https://thehockeywriters.com/category/san-jose-sharks/feed/";

$curl = curl_init();
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; WOW64; rv:17.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/17.0");
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
$data = curl_exec($curl);
$httpcode = curl_getinfo($curl, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);
curl_close($curl);

if ($httpcode !== 200)
{
    echo "Failed to retrieve feed... Error code: $httpcode";
    die();
}

$xml = new DOMDocument();
$xml->loadXML($data);
// list all titles...
foreach ($xml->getElementsByTagName("item") as $item)
{
    foreach ($item->getElementsByTagName("title") as $title)
    {
        echo $title->nodeValue, "<br>\n";
    }
}

If you just want to print the title/description of all items:

foreach ($feed->channel->item as $item)
{
    echo $item->title;
    echo $item->description;
    // uncomment the below line to print only the first entry.
    // break;
}

If you want just the first entry, without using a foreach:

echo $feed->channel->item[0]->title;
echo $feed->channel->item[0]->description;

Saving title and description to an array for later using it:

$result = [];
foreach ($feed->channel->item as $item)
{
    $result[] = 
    [
        'title' => (string)$item->title,
        'description' => (string)$item->description
    ];
    // could make a key => value alternatively from the above with 
    // title as key like this: 
    // $result[(string)$item->title] = (string)$item->description;
}

Foreach with MySQLi/PDO prepared statement:

foreach ($feed->channel->item as $item)
{
    // MySQLi
    $stmt->bind_param('ss', $item->title, $item->description);
    $stmt->execute();
    // PDO
    //$stmt->bindParam(':title', $item->title, PDO::PARAM_STR);
    //$stmt->bindParam(':description', $item->description, PDO::PARAM_STR);
    //$stmt->execute();
}