The Strange Explosion of Hockey Romance

Hockey is everywhere—but it has nothing to do with the Stanley Cup playoffs. Amazon’s series Off Campus, about a music student and a hockey player falling in love at a fictional American university, is an enormous hit, racking up 36 million viewers in less than two weeks. And before that, Rachel Reid’s Heated Rivalry parlayed a devoted BookTok fandom into Crave’s most-watched original series to date. Hockey romance is dominating pop culture.

Sports romance novels have been around for years. There was Susan Elizabeth Phillips’s Chicago Stars football series in the early 2000s, Jaci Burton’s scantily clad football and baseball heroes in the 2010s, and Alexa Martin’s football romances, which debuted in 2018. But in the age of BookTok, hockey has reigned supreme. And many of the genre’s most prolific authors are Canadian, including Becka Mack, Stephanie Archer, Helena Hunting and, of course, Elle Kennedy, the author of the Off Campus series.

Kennedy wrote The Deal—the first instalment and the source material for the Amazon show’s first season—back in 2015. The novel is a banter-filled romp featuring BookTok’s favorite tropes: enemies-to-lovers (think Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet) and fake dating (when the characters pretend to be in a relationship, only to fall in love for real). Kennedy’s books were popular when they were released, but reached stratospheric levels with the advent of BookTok. The trend continued with British author Hannah Grace’s Icebreaker in 2022, which follows Anastasia, a collegiate figure skater determined to make the Olympics. When her university’s second (second!) hockey rink is vandalized, the figure skaters and hockey players are forced to share ice time, thrusting her into the orbit of Nate, captain of the hockey team. Never mind the fact that figure skating isn’t actually a college sport—Icebreaker spent more than 40 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

The Deal and Icebreaker share more than hockey in common. Neither of their authors is American, but both stories are set at American colleges. Both series have cozy campus vibes and feature a sprawling cast of playboys with hearts of gold. Hockey serves as a convenient construct to provide readers with a team, a communal living situation and a certain amount of social status. (After all, romance readers have always loved a billionaire or a duke.) Hockey is also, at least for many American readers, a lesser-known sport, where hand-waving about the particulars is easier to accept. But why has this iconically Canadian sport captured the public imagination? Why not football or baseball or rugby?

For one thing, a hockey team is a manageable size. There are only ever six players on one team on the ice at any given moment. And for a genre that often builds out a series of interconnected novels following every member of a family or player on a team, the structure makes sense.

Another contributing factor is hockey’s intrinsic intensity. There are far fewer fights on the ice than there once were, but hockey is still the most violent of pro sports in North America. This lends itself well to the hyper-masculine characters that BookTokers love. We see them in romantasy novels, where Shadow Daddys—morally grey, dominant male love interests—are a popular trope. But the Off Campus TV show turns this one on its head. When the male lead, Garrett, is overcome with anger and fights another player (who once assaulted his love interest, Hannah), his violent outburst threatens his career—even though, in real life, fighting continues to be valued in the sport.

These adaptations walk an interesting line: taking advantage of hockey’s inherent danger while also presenting a more idealized, gentler version of the sport. Hockey romances are populated by men who showcase emotional intelligence and respect women—areas where real-life athletes so often fail to measure up.

In its idealized heroes, however, the hockey romance genre can also be a way to avoid diversity. BookTok has contributed to the romance genre’s diversity backsliding, establishing an algorithmic ecosystem where the books that achieve mass popularity lean heavily toward books with white protagonists. And in the real world, hockey is statistically the whitest major sport in North America. By targeting this specific setting, hockey romances are tapping into a built-in demographic that satisfies the algorithm. There are rare exceptions, of course: notably, Heated Rivalry’s Shane Hollander is half-Japanese, and his heritage is a plot point in the show.

The final key to hockey romance’s success are its homosocial dynamics. In romance, readers respond to found families and expansive casts of characters that lend themselves to longer series. What better place to establish a group of emotionally intelligent male friends who will all find love and support each other than in a team? In hockey, there’s also ferda: slang that means to do it for the boys or for the team. There’s a strong team-first culture in the sport that provides the perfect setting for fantasies of close male friendship (and, as is the case in Heated Rivalry, for actual homoeroticism). One of the most successful pieces of the Off Campus show is the close friendship between the four primary hockey players (who will all go on to get their own love stories, season by season). 

For some viewers, however, the hockey aspect of both shows could be merely incidental. Television adaptations of romance novels—which are some of the most popular books in the world—have been thin on the ground, with a few exceptions (Bridgerton, for one). Heated Rivalry and Off Campus have found an audience because they’re some of the first romance adaptations to embrace the genre’s huge audience, not afraid to celebrate the tropes and big emotions that are often lacking in perfunctory adaptations. Crave’s production of Heated Rivalry, in particular, embraces the high heat level and intimacy that resonates with readers of the romance genre, at least in part because a smaller Canadian team might have more freedom in what they portray on screen than a larger, American production would.

Readers and viewers alike might be enjoying learning about hockey through its presence in these stories, but ultimately, they’re responding to well-drafted and well-portrayed love stories after a long drought. Maybe the hockey is just a bonus.

Alyssa Morris analyzes BookTok trends on her Substack Romancing the Phone.

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