I live in rural Tasmania. In Australia. Where it is currently summer and the nearest ice rink is a very long drive away. And yet somehow, I have spent the last several years building a fictional NHL franchise — complete with AHL and ECHL affiliates, a cheer squad, a rival team transplanted to Honolulu, a women’s league, a band, a television production company, and a cast of characters so large they now occupy 385 pages of series bible.
Fifty-eight books. That’s where this universe currently sits. Fifty-eight.
I tell you this not to brag — well, maybe a little — but because I want you to understand that what started as one hockey romance series has grown into something I genuinely did not plan and could not have predicted. And the reason it was able to grow like that, the reason those threads kept revealing themselves and asking to be followed, is because of what I did right at the very beginning. I built the roster first.
If you’ve ever fallen down the rabbit hole of a hockey romance series — and if you’re here, I’m guessing you have — you’ll know that specific feeling of finishing one book and immediately wanting to know whose story is coming next. You’ve spotted them in the background. You’ve caught a line of dialogue that made you sit up straighter. You’ve watched a character do something small and telling and thought oh, you have a whole book inside you, don’t you?
That’s not an accident. That’s an author who built their roster on purpose.
Creating a fictional hockey team that can sustain multiple books is one of the most satisfying and most underestimated parts of writing a hockey romance universe. Get it right and you have a living, breathing world that readers will return to again and again. Get it wrong and you end up frantically inventing new characters out of thin air every time you need a hero, with no connective tissue holding anything together.
So let’s talk about how to do it well.
Start With More Players Than You’ll Ever Need
Here’s the first and most important thing: build a bigger roster than you think you’ll use. A real NHL team carries around 23 players on their active roster, plus a minor league affiliate full of hopefuls and call-ups. You don’t need to develop all of them. You don’t even need to name all of them. But you need to know they exist, because that depth is what makes your team feel real rather than like a convenient vehicle for romance plots.
I know this because I accidentally proved it. When I started building my Portland franchise, I named not just the NHL roster but the entire AHL affiliate and the ECHL affiliate beneath that. At the time I thought I was being obsessive. What I was actually doing was creating a pipeline — a world of players at different stages of their careers, with different levels of certainty about their futures, and entirely different emotional landscapes to explore. Some of my richest story potential lives in those affiliate rosters. The guy grinding away in the ECHL trying to crack the big league carries a very different energy to the established NHL star, and both of them deserve a love story.
Give yourself permission to populate your world generously at the start, even if most of those names are just names for now. Some of them will surprise you. You’ll write a throwaway line about a guy who snores on the team bus and suddenly you’ll know exactly who he is and why he’s lonely and what kind of person would crack his heart open. That’s the magic of a fully realised roster — it creates its own stories without you forcing anything.
Think in Positions, Personalities, and Contrasts
One of the best ways to approach your initial character building is to think about the natural contrasts that hockey positions create. You’ve got your forwards who score the glory goals and eat up public attention. You’ve got your defensemen who do the unglamorous protective work and rarely get the credit. You’ve got your goalies, who are famously, delightfully unhinged, existing in their own psychological universe at the other end of the ice. And you’ve got your enforcers and grinders — the guys who bring the physical sacrifice, whose relationship with their own bodies is often complicated and rich with story potential.
These aren’t just tactical distinctions. They’re personality frameworks. The flashy sniper who can’t stop seeking the spotlight. The shutdown defenseman who has spent his entire career protecting other people and has no idea how to let anyone protect him. The goalie who has developed elaborate superstitions to manage the crushing psychological pressure of being the last line of defence. These archetypes are familiar enough to feel grounded and distinct enough to give each hero their own flavour.
You want contrast working for you throughout your roster — not just in terms of position, but in terms of personality, background, age, and where each character sits in their career arc. Mix your veterans with your rookies. Mix your confident public personas with your private introverts. Mix the guy who grew up wealthy in a major hockey market with the kid who played on an outdoor rink in a small town because that was all his family could afford.
In my own universe I went even further with contrast by building a rival franchise in Honolulu — which is about as far from Portland’s grey skies and rain-soaked streets as you can get while staying in the same league. The contrast between those two cities does atmospheric work for me across fifteen books before I’ve written a single word of rivalry. Contrast is doing the heavy lifting before your characters even open their mouths.
Know Your Captain
Every team has a captain, and in a hockey romance universe, your captain matters enormously. They set the tone for what your team values. They’re the character other players measure themselves against, or push back against, or desperately want approval from. They shape the culture of your locker room, which in turn shapes the world your heroes inhabit.
Your captain doesn’t have to be your first hero or even a hero at all — sometimes the most interesting captains are supporting characters who show up across multiple books, consistent and grounding, a fixed point in a shifting world. But you need to know who they are and what they stand for before you write anything else, because that knowledge will inform every scene set in the team environment.
Ask yourself: is your captain old school or progressive? Do they lead by example or by force of personality? Are they beloved or complicated? Do they know what’s happening in their locker room, or are they deliberately not looking? The answers ripple outward through your entire universe. In my Portland franchise, the culture of the team flows directly from the founding vision of the coach and his wife — who are also part owners — and that means the values embedded at the very top of the organisation shape everything below it. Your captain is the on-ice expression of those values. Choose them carefully.
Plant Future Heroes in Current Stories
This is the craft element that separates a good hockey romance series from a great one, and it’s simpler than it sounds. When you’re writing your first book, you should already know — at least in broad strokes — whose stories are coming next. Not necessarily the full plot, but enough to seed that character into your current narrative with intention.
Give your future hero a moment. One scene where they say something that sticks. A gesture that reveals character. A reaction that hints at a wound the current story doesn’t have time to explore. You’re not writing their book yet — you’re making a promise to your reader that there’s more here than they’re currently seeing. Readers are remarkably good at picking up on this. They will notice the guy standing slightly apart from the group. They will clock the joke that lands a little too sharp to be entirely a joke. They will remember.
I discovered this accidentally when I was building my universe and realised I’d already seeded characters from the cheer squad and the band into the team’s world without consciously planning to. They were just there, orbiting the roster, because that’s what real people do — they exist in community with each other. When the time came to give those characters their own books, the groundwork was already laid. The readers who’d been there from the beginning would know these people. That’s an extraordinary gift to give your readership.
Don’t Forget the World Around the Roster
Here is something I learned the slightly hard way: a hockey team doesn’t exist in isolation. The cheer squad are there at every home game. The front office shapes every decision. The coaching staff carry their own complicated histories and loyalties. The partners and families of your players have entire interior lives that intersect with the team world in ways that create conflict and warmth and story.
In my universe, none of the women who will eventually become partners to these players know that’s their future yet. They’re just living their lives — working, creating, competing — and the team exists alongside them in the same city. That’s how real relationships form. Not through convenient plot mechanics but through proximity and time and the way certain worlds keep overlapping until two people can’t keep pretending they haven’t noticed each other.
Build the whole ecosystem, not just the roster. The roster is the heart. Everything else is the circulatory system that keeps it alive.
Keep a Series Bible and Protect It Fiercely
By the time you’re three books into a hockey romance series, you will have made a staggering number of small decisions about your team, your city, your arena, your front office, and your characters’ histories. The rookie year of a character mentioned in book one. The name of the team’s coach. The record-breaking season your captain had seven years ago. The bar where the team goes after home games.
None of these things feel important when you first write them. All of them become potential continuity disasters if you don’t track them.
My series bible is currently 385 pages long. I know that sounds extreme. It is extreme. It also means I can tell you the jersey number of every player on three league rosters, the names of every member of the cheer squad, and the exact configuration of relationships that will eventually connect my California characters to my Portland family. That document is the reason 58 books can share a universe without collapsing under the weight of their own continuity.
You don’t need 385 pages to start. You need a running document, updated as you write, that captures every decision you make about your world. Start it on day one. Future you will be deeply, profoundly grateful.
Let the Roster Evolve Naturally
Real hockey teams change. Players retire. Trades happen. Rookies arrive. Careers end earlier than anyone expected because the body has limits — and I have one character in my universe whose entire second act, including the franchise he eventually builds, exists because his body gave out before he was finished. The grief of that cut short career became the foundation of something extraordinary. That only works if you’re willing to let your fictional world move through time honestly.
Let your roster breathe. When a veteran character reaches the natural end of their playing days, let them retire — and then use that transition as story material, because the identity crisis of a professional athlete facing the end of their career is absolute gold for character-driven romance. When a trade serves the story, make the trade. When an exciting rookie arrives and shakes up the existing team dynamics, let that arrival land with real weight.
The team should feel like it’s moving through time alongside your readers, not sitting still waiting for each new hero’s story to begin.
Building a roster that drives multiple books is ultimately about one thing: treating your characters as people before they’re plot devices. Give them depth even when they’re in the background. Give them history even when the page doesn’t have room for it. Give them a world that feels like it exists whether or not you’re currently writing about them.
I built my Portland franchise from a tiny island in the Southern Ocean, following a sport I love despite never having easy access to it, because the world of hockey romance grabbed me and wouldn’t let go. The roster I built became a universe I genuinely didn’t plan. And every single one of those 58 books exists because I took the time at the beginning to make the team real before I made the romance.
Do that, and your readers won’t just finish one book and move on. They’ll stay. They’ll wait. They’ll come back for every single story you’ve promised them — because you made them care about the whole team, not just the hero of the moment.
And honestly? That’s the dream.
Bella Bruce 