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?
Whispering Gums 
Probably the last sports-related novel I read through was Semi-Tough by Dan Jenkins, which was published nearer fifty than forty years ago. The narrator was a running back in the NFL. Jenkins did write a sequel, and I think was drafting yet another when he died; but I didn’t follow up.
I have read some of Ring Lardner’s You Know Me Al books, epistolary stories set around baseball, but that’s really about it for books set in and around professional sports.
I think that I read some sports fiction before my teen years, but I don’t remember them distinctly.
I do encounter relevant chapters in novels: a vicious (American) football game in The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan by James Farrell; a high-stakes golf match in The Morte d’Urban by J.F. Powers; a tennis match in The Spectator Bird by Wallace Stegner; summer softball games in the Hamptons in The Boys of Winter by Wilfrid Sheed. There the sports count for something and move the plot along. But all of the contestants have other occupations, and most are in middle age.
Enjoyed this George. Thanks for sharing your encounters with sport in fiction. Like you I have come across sport in my fiction reading, the most memorable one being Tim Winton’s Breath, set in surfing culture and about masculinity. Gillian Mears’ Foal’s bread has horse high jumping, and Christos Tsiolkas’ Barracuda features competitive swimming at the school level, and carries through to the impact on adulthood of how all that went for its protagonist. All these start with young people. Another that focuses on young people is one I haven’t read, Steven Carroll’s The gift of speed which apparently has a character obsessed with cricket.
Probably the novel that I’ve read that focuses most specifically on sport, with a specific intention about sport, is Karen Viggers’ Sidelines which takes up the issue of parental pressure in youth sport.
Interestingly, I’ve read a bit of nonfiction about sport, most recently Helen Garner’s The season in which she follows her adolescent grandson and his team through a football season.
When you start thinking …
Hi Sue, I do not seek out romance novels nor sports romance novels to read. Though I have read a few. By far, I have read more non fiction novels about sports people. Funnily enough, yesterday when I was looking up the Irish-Australian author Mary Costello, I discovered she had written a sports romance novel, The Reluctant Wag.
Haha, Meg, I love those coincidences or synchronicities.
I enjoy sport. I enjoy romance fiction (and I thought enemies-to-lovers was compulsory in Mills & Boon). I am still yet to find, let alone read, Miles Franklin’s one M&B novel, The Net of Circumstance (1915).
I have two ‘sport’ novels, both horse racing – Tamarisk Row, Gerald Murnane and Four Legged Lottery, Frank Hardy. Neither, I think, contains any romance. I thought I might have Barry Oakley’s A Salute to the Great McCarthy (aussie rules), but I can’t see it. I wonder if it has a bit of romance on the side.
Oh good point about Salute to the Great McCarthy Bill … I wonder. But if it does that won’t be its raison d’être will it. I must read Tamarisk Row.
I have no idea whether enemies-to-lovers is compulsory in Mills & Boon but I bet HEA is.
I get so much enjoyment going through NetGalley’s list of new books and the pun style headings of the romance sport genre! All bets are off, ready to play, the fast track, Playing with Fire, they are all terrible! Whether it is mixing romance with cats (You Had Me At Meow), or with the weather (Fall for Me) or Pride & Prejudice (Pride Comes Before A Fall). I guess it is a way of identifying them!
I do have a sport book that I want to read though, ‘The First Sunday in September’ it is about Hurling based in Ireland. It is a collection of experiences of different people as they get close to the All Ireland Hurling Final.
Oh I love this Rach. You are so right about the titles. Sports terminology is made for it isn’t it! Great pick up. There are a lot on “play”. Surely there’s a “Playing the field”!
That hurling book sounds interesting if it’s real people’s experiences.
I will let you know when I finally read it. Phil has been hassling me to read it and as it has a day of the week in the title, which is one of my themes for the 52 Book Club, I will probably read it this year.
I look forward to it!
I can’t say I’ve read extensively in this sub-genre but I’m actually more likely to pick up a sports romance than a straightforward romance. A number of reasons: I’m one of those people who never watches sports in real life but likes reading about them, and you get a good number of queer sports romances, too. Also, one of my big problems with romance novels is that the reasons why the couple don’t just get together often feel weak, and sports romances have more scope for finding genuine obstacles.
Oh they are good reasons Laura. I love it when my left field posts results in ideas I hadn’t thought of.
I do watch sport – certain ones anyhow, like tennis. And am happy to read about it but I’m not drawn to romance as a genre. I probably read more nonfiction. Seabiscuit for example, a long time ago now and I don’t like horse racing but … !
I feel like anymore most new-book bookstores are romance bookstores by default. They can only afford to keep so much product on the shelves, and when romance and romantasy sell, that is what fills the store.
In fact, I’ve stopped shopping at the local bookstore because there is SO little there that isn’t romantasy or romance, and this is not a niche bookstore. She just needs to pay the bills to keep the place open, and romance does that.
I did read that hockey romances are so popular because there is a contrast of the brutality and masculinity of those who play the sport juxtaposed with the softness of romance. Why gay hockey novels are so popular, I am not sure. Maybe the same reason? But it’s still women who tend to read them, though the internet tells me gay men are coming on board now. Hooray! More readers!
Oh that’s interesting re bookshops Melanie. I first heard of the specialist romance bookshop in my city via the news article. The three bookshops I visit most are all independent stores and I haven’t seen any great preponderance of romance and romantasy at them. But, my city is probably a bit different in terms of its reading public.
That argument for the popularity of hockey romance doesn’t completely make sense to me. I would rather not have the brutality and machismo in the first place! This is the most worrying thing about many male sports – it’ a big issue in the main football codes here. If romance somehow covers that up and make it seem alright, that’s a worry? Is that what this argument is implying?
I think the trope is basically a twist on beauty and the beast. If you have a male female romance novel, she always does something delicate, like figure skating. He seems brutal by comparison, but if she can tame him, what a romance it’ll make! That’s the thinking. I’m not sure what a male male hockey romance would look like because I haven’t read one. Maybe it’s a similar dynamic! No clue.
Thanks Melanie … that makes sense. Doesn’t matter in a way if it’s not specifically the case here because I get how it is a romance trope that might be at play.
I usually have a romance in my stack, on-the-go, but I don’t think any has been about sports. And I can rarely remember the different names for the different categories of romance fiction, until someone mentions one. Mostly they end up being workplace or business romances I guess, with restaurants/cafes a recurring scenario. Which makes sense for me, not being especially sporty.
I don’t tend to have romances on my pike’s but I have reviewed a small number of chicklit which is a sub genre I think, though maybe we’ve grown beyond the need for that?
I’m not sure if it would be considered a subgenre; I think the romance genre gets more respect today than was once true. And it’s certainly a much more diverse field than it was too. It’s nice to have next to the bed for those nights when I accidentally read about something grim after dark. (If you haven’t read Curtis Sittenfeld’s retelling of Jane Austen, Eligible, I thought it was a delight. But I know you avoid retellings, of favourites at least? And you aren’t adding ANYthing to your TBR anyway. lol)
If you want an Austen retelling, you could always try Puck & Prejudice.
You are right I do avoid retellings, which is not to say I have never read them but some in my group read some of the project that Eligible was part of and overall they were disliked. I seem to remember one getting a semi-seal of approval, but I don’t think it was that one. However, with you recommendation and the fact that it is Curtis Sittenfeld, I would not dismiss it outright if it came my way!!
When the hockey romance books starting hitting the shelves about 4yrs ago, we were joking around at work trying to find the right tag for them puck-rom, puck-love…which quickly went downhill from there 😀
Our Sydney shop has also just created a dedicated romance section for the first time in its 50 yr history – it’s a thing! B25 has dubbed the books his partner likes to read ‘dragon-fairy-porn’ and has been known to read a few of them himself 🙂
Oh this is fascinating Brona.
So now I realise Puck and Prejudice is an ice-hockey romance retelling? I didn’t pick that up in you comment above. Stupid me. I was thinking Shakespeare’s Puck!!
I wonder if Daughter Gums’ fantasy reading spills over at all into this area. I’ll have to ask her.