A Pucking Sensation
The enduring appeal of hockey romance
Apologies for the unexpected week off - COVID took me out last week. If you haven’t gotten vaccinated yet, please go. This Sunday, I’ll be sharing a link roundup for paid subscribers, including my COVID media diet. And in the meantime, enjoy this extra long edition of Romancing the Phone.
As previously discussed, it’s spooky cozy season, and I continue to see witchy reads roundups on my FYP. But it’s also the beginning of another season equally important to BookTok: hockey season.
If you’re new to romance and/or BookTok, this may be surprising, but in recent years the worlds of romance and hockey have become deeply entwined. Sports romances have been more and less popular over the years - Susan Elizabeth Phillips with her Chicago Stars football series in the early 2000s, Jaci Burton’s scantily clad heroes in the 2010s (recently re-released with illustrated covers, of course), Alexa Martin’s football romances beginning in 2018. But in the age of BookTok, hockey has reigned supreme.
This isn’t even a particularly new phenomenon - one of BookTok’s favorite hockey romance writers is Elle Kennedy, who has been writing bestselling new adult novels about the hockey team at the fictional Briar U since 2015. The first book in her Off-Campus series, The Deal, a banter-filled romp including BookTok’s favorite tropes, enemies to lovers and fake dating, was one of my favorite reads of 2015. Since then, it has amassed 94,952 Amazon reviews and nearly 800,000 Goodreads ratings.
In fact, The Deal has been a staple of hockey romance for so long, Elle Kennedy has also released a novel, The Graham Effect, focused on the daughter of Garret and Hannah, the couple at the center of The Deal.
Side note: my personal favorite of this era of new adult sports romances is The Friend Zone by Kristen Callihan, which has not received the bump that The Deal did (probably because it’s about football).
But hockey romance is far more popular now than it was in 2015, and turning to Google Trends, you can pinpoint the moment when this shift began - fall 2022. Icebreaker by Hannah Grace, released in November 2022, was perfectly positioned to ride this wave. It was so perfectly positioned, in fact, that it has spent over 40 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.
“So hockey romance is definitely having a moment, as it fucking should. I didn’t really see why it was a thing, but after reading Icebreaker by Hannah Grace, I certainly can understand why it’s a thing.” -@tierney.reads on TikTok
Icebreaker is about a collegiate figure skater, Anastasia, who is determined to make the Olympics. When her university’s second (second!!) hockey rink is vandalized, the figure skaters and hockey players must share ice time, thrusting her into the orbit of Nate, captain of the hockey team. Never mind the fact that figure skating is not a college sport.
I read this book last year and didn’t particularly enjoy it, mostly because I couldn’t get past how poorly researched the sports content was. Anastasia switches from pairs skating to singles skating and becomes an Olympic singles champion within a year, which was so wildly unrealistic to someone with a baseline knowledge of contemporary figure skating that I couldn’t overcome my annoyance. But readers love the cozy campus vibes and sprawling cast of fuckboy hockey players with hearts of gold. And Icebreaker hits many of the tropes readers expect from a hockey romance - a cocky athlete who needs to be knocked down a peg and learn a lesson, a type A heroine who needs to learn to relax, and lots of spice.
It’s interesting to note that many of the most popular hockey romances focus on the sport at the collegiate level rather than the NHL and, like Icebreaker, don’t always focus on the particularities of the sport outside of skating and fighting. They also often sport sweet, pastel-colored cartoon covers.
Another BookTok favorite is Liz Tomforde, whose Windy City series covers hockey, basketball, and baseball. Tomforde’s books are more focused on the logistics of playing a sport and all of the people involved in making a team run. The FMC of the first in the series, Mile High, is a flight attendant for a hockey team’s private charter plane. Are the details here accurate? It’s much harder to know, which is part of what makes Tomforde’s books feel unique. The FMC of the most recent book in the series, Play Along, is a sports medicine doctor whose career has been limited by sexism in sports. Tomforde is writing about sports at the professional rather than collegiate level, and the themes are more adult. While her books read much like contemporary romcoms, they’re quite long for the genre, with Mile High clocking in at 490 pages. But the women of BookTok LOVE an overly-long novel. You can tell these books are wildly popular because they’ve gotten the full mood board treatment (see below).
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Chelsea Curto is my pick for hockey romance’s next big thing. The first in her D.C. Stars series is Face Off: A Spicy Rivals to Lovers Hockey Romance, and it does what it says on the tin (stay tuned for an issue about meta data and SEO keywords in Kindle Unlimited titles). Curto flips the script by making the FMC the first female hockey player to make it to the NHL, a trope that I am surprised we don’t see more of in sports romance (justice for Pitch). Curto’s books read a lot like Tomforde’s - alpha jock heroes and a cast of plucky female friends to serve as sequel bait.
The upcoming hockey release I’m most interested in is TikToker Lexi LaFleur Brown’s upcoming debut, Shoot Your Shot, releasing in March 2025. Brown is the wife of retired hockey player and current hockey commentator JT Brown and has made a name for herself on TikTok reviewing hockey romances for accuracy.
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As with any BookTok trend, there are dark hockey romances as well. Until I Get You by Claire Contreras has a cover that screams shadow daddy and a MMC described as morally grey, a collegiate hockey player projected to be selected first in the NHL draft. Brutal Obsession by S. Massery, released in November 2022 just like Icebreaker, is described as a bully romance. Hockey players more than many other athletes have a reputation as bad boys, allowing the genre to contain every imaginable romance trope, from sweet to stalker.
If you’ve read this far, you might be wondering - why hockey? Why not baseball or football or soccer or rugby - the list goes on. There are a few reasons I can postulate here, beyond the simple power of the trend.
The size of the team is manageable: there are only ever six players on one team on the ice at any given moment in hockey - three forwards, two defensemen, and a goalie. While there are far more than six players on a full team, a series could get away with focusing on six players.
Violence: these days, there are far fewer fights in hockey than there once were, but it is still the most violent of the popular professional sports in North America, which lends itself well to the hyper masculine MMCs that are currently popular with BookTokers.
Homosocial dynamics: In order to explain this one, I have to define ferda: hockey slang that means to do it for the boys or for the team. There is a strong team first culture in hockey (that in the real world can lead to incredible toxicity) that provides the perfect setting for fantasies of close male friendship.
Hockey is statistically the whitest sport, which is an aspect that cannot be ignored considering that BookTok has in many ways erased the gains of movements to diversify romance.
There have been a number of excellent queer baseball romances in the past couple of years, in particular Cat Sebastian’s 1960s-set historical You Should Be So Lucky, KT Hoffman’s minor league-set The Prospects, and K.D. Casey’s second chance romance, Diamond Ring. All three of these are deeply researched, with baseball and the complicated dynamics of a team playing a serious role in the plots of the books. Often, queer sports romances are focused on unpacking the toxic realities of sports culture rather than existing in an idealized fantasy of what locker room dynamics might be like.
Because BookTok is a visual medium, there has been more than the usual amount of crossover between the real world of sports and the world of romantic fiction. BookTokers create fancams of their favorite characters using video footage of real hockey players, which has led to real world consequences. Last summer, Seattle Kraken player Alex Wennberg and his wife called out horny fan edits for crossing a line. Unless you want to listen to the ten minute voice memo I sent my sister about this last summer, you can read this Rolling Stone summary for more details.
Amazon Prime is premiering a new show, FACEOFF: Inside the NHL on October 4. The series, made by the production company behind Drive to Survive, Netflix’s viral Formula 1 docu-series, follows several hockey superstars through the 2024 postseason chase for the Stanley Cup. Will romance readers flock to the series for a behind the scenes look at the realities of hockey stardom? Will clips from the show become the next trending audio used to promote new hockey romance? Stay tuned.
Finally, all of this leads to a logical question - what sport is next for BookTok? While the fervor around hockey has perhaps faded a bit since the Kraken controversy, hockey romances remain popular and no other sport has arisen to take its place. One possibility? Formula 1. There have been a few driver romances, particularly Lauren Asher’s Dirty Air series, but nothing to rival hockey yet. Formula 1 would be an interesting playground for authors, considering the wealth and glamor of the teams and the fact that it would be extremely easy to avoid sports logistics entirely in the plot. People have attempted pickleball romances to little success, and the summer Olympics haven’t yet inspired a wave of rugby or equestrian or track and field-focused stories.
Imaginary Celebrity Book Club
Don’t you think Simone Biles might be a BookTok girlie? I’d love the GOAT’s perspective on sports romances, especially books where women are the athletes at the center of the story. And it doesn’t hurt that she’s also a football WAG. Simone is also a noted Swiftie, so I think her first pick should be Heavy Hitter by Katie Cotungo, a delightful sports romance inspired by Taylor and Travis. Simone, call me.
If you’ve read a particularly interesting sports romance, or if you have a rec for more Taylor and Travis fanfiction, let me know! I’m surprised we haven’t seen a flood of popstar and athlete romances hit TikTok yet but I am waiting with bated breath.
I love almost everything Emily Rath writes--the Jacksonville Rays series is so good (and majority poly--the books are MMFM, MF, MMF, MM, and FFM, respectively, with the fourth and fifth yet to be released).
The only hockey romances I’ve really enjoyed are queer ones. Recommend Ari Baran’s books - he has a M/M hockey series with a female NHL player as a recurrent side character