Last February, I wrote about Romance novels in my “supporting genres” Monday Musings subseries. Today’s post could be seen as an extension of that post, in that it is about a Romance subgenre, Sports Romance. I have to admit that I had never heard of this sub-genre until a couple of days ago when a segment on ABC news here (text version) talked about the two hugely successful shows, the queer hockey romance series Heated Rivalry and Off Campus, a romantic drama about college hockey players. Both, the program said, were adapted from ice hockey romance novels. It’s a subgenre, the ABC said, that has developed a devoted fandom, particularly through TikTok.

The ABC quoted Beth Taylor, the owner of the Astoria Romance & Fantasy Bookstore in my home city of Canberra. She apparently said that “the intensity and physicality of the sport translated well into romance” and that reading

romance has typically been something we hide … but I think it’s coming forward — people aren’t ashamed of it, they’re proud of it, they’re bringing their books to games.

I shouldn’t be surprised. After all, Australia has the reputation of being one of the biggest sports loving countries in the world – a reputation backed up by various metrics relating to expenditure, attendance at sporting events, and wins on the international stage. (We don’t, apparently, do so well in metrics counting activity levels amongst our youth!) Most Australians know this. What I didn’t know was that Australian sports romance is booming.

According to University lecturer Kasey Symons, writing in The Conversation last year, “romance fiction sales in Australia are up, with an average growth rate of 49% over three years”. She said that dedicated romance bookstores are popping up world-wide, partly due to the work of social media communities such as “BookTok” and “Bookstagram” and to opportunities for digital and self-publishing. And, in particular, sports romance titles are contributing to the growing romance numbers. They are also helping attract new and non-traditional fans to sports. Sports romance fiction is not a new thing, she said, but its popularity has increased in recent years, primarily through ice hockey.

But, there’s romance fiction across the sports. There’s Formula 1 romance fiction, football (soccer), not to mention golf, chess (that’s a sport, apparently), lacrosse, tennis, basketball, pickleball, Australian rules football, swimming, ballet, baseball, e-sports, and more. Apparently – see my comment below!

Writing for the ABC back in January, Symons makes the point that

While many titles replicate stereotypical and heteronormative tropes and relationships common to romance, there is a strong sub-genre of queer sports romance that depicts different sports narratives.

That said, in The Conversation she says that the majority of sports romance texts “reflect heteronormative relationships and depict some of the more stereotypical, idealised body types and aesthetics often associated with the romance genre and athletic bodies”. The diverse titles however, do “explore relationships across genders, sexualities, ethnicities, body shapes and different sports”. She quotes Australian author Abra Pressler as saying on her Instagram account:

Sports romance is a huge vehicle to ask “what stories aren’t being told” and to explore really heavy, hard themes while promising the reader that things will be okay in the end.

Selected Australian sports romance novels

Despite all this enthusiasm engendered by the ice hockey craze, which is surely still a niche field in Australia despite recent rushes to the head created by the aforementioned shows, I didn’t find it easy to track down Australian sports romance writers. However, persistence pays, though even AI did struggle to produce something authoritative. Fortunately, I’m not writing an academic treatise, and simply want to tip our toes in the water, so here goes.

It seems that a writer named Amy Andrews is one of Australia’s most significant, or prolific, sports romance writers. She has apparently help make rugby (football) Australia’s biggest sports-romance setting. Now, this – unlike ice hockey – makes sense. She is published internationally through Mills & Boon and Harlequin, and is a USA Today bestselling author. She does not have a Wikipedia page. On her own website, she promotes her Sydney Smoke rugby series with the tagline: “No helmets. No Pads. Just balls”.

In my brief select list, I have tried to represent a variety of sports, but it wasn’t easy.

• Amy Andrews, Sydney Smoke series: an 8-book (to date) series about rugby, starting with Playing by her rules (2016) and ending with Playing it tough (2023).
• Iris Blobel, Australian Sports Stars series: seems to be a 3-book series initially published between 2014 and 2017: Love will find you (AFL/Australian Football League, 2014, republished as Decisive moments, 2021), Let me love you (Baseball, 2015, republished as Defining moments, 2021), and I think I love you (Soccer, 2017, republished as Entangled moments, 2022).
• Clare Fletcher, Love match (2023): queer romance about women playing community rugby in regional Queensland.
• Darcy Green, After the siren (2025): sports rom-com (debut novel published by Penguin) about two queer men on the same fictional AFL team; recognised for its focus on inclusion in modern Aussie sports, as is Pressler’s novel.
• Abra Pressler, Love and other scores (2023): queer romance about a global tennis superstar looking for first his Grand Slam title at the Australian Open. According to her website, Pressler is based in my city of Canberra and “is an avid Sydney Swans [AFL] supporter”. I wonder if she plans to write a football-based romance.

These books cover common romance tropes, most particularly, as Symons discusses in The Conversation, the Happily Ever After (HEA, to romance readers). Symons writes that in sports romance, many authors use “this approach to challenge social norms, restrictive sporting environments and advocate for inclusion by presenting narratives where these tensions are resolved and everything works out”. Other romance tropes found in this sub-genre include the enemies-to-lovers, forced proximity, sunshine vs grumpy character storylines. Some, like Clare Fletcher’s for example, also sit within the rural fiction genre.

What is interesting is that, for a sports mad country, our sports romance seems to focus on the football codes. There are some about surfing, cricket, tennis, horse-riding competitions and so on but not a lot. I searched and searched, and followed many angles, but mostly came to dead-ends – to one-offs, to YA (which is not my focus here), to those set around the culture rather than on the sport or sportsperson specifically. AI, in particular, pointed me to books that didn’t exist or were plain wrong. I did find some others but most explored more of the same, not other sports.

Oh, and some romance authors are prolific, writing many novels across a range of settings and subject matter, not just sport.

I will close here. This was a curious post to write, but I’m glad I’ve done it, if only because I’ve learnt about something I had no idea was out there. What about you?