Some rivalries are born on the ice.
Others are born in a parking lot outside an arena at eleven o’clock at night when a Portland Pioneer looks up and realises the man walking towards him is wearing a Thunder Bay Storm jacket and everything that has been simmering for three seasons is about to come to a very ugly head.
And some rivalries — the best ones, the ones that outlast careers and follow franchises across an entire continent and end up generating fifteen books in a fictional hockey universe — are born from something so personal, so raw, and so fundamentally human that the sport almost becomes incidental. The games between Portland and Thunder Bay were always gritty. Always nasty. Never ended without someone paying a physical price and everyone leaving with their tempers running a few degrees hotter than when they arrived. But what turned a fierce on-ice competition into something that went bone-deep for both franchises was the day the Thunder Bay captain went after the wife of one of the Pioneers forwards.
I’ll let you sit with that for a moment.
Because that — right there — is what a rivalry is actually made of.
Competition Alone Is Not a Rivalry
Here is a distinction that matters enormously and that sports romance sometimes glosses over: competition is not the same thing as rivalry. Two teams can compete fiercely, can push each other to their limits, can produce spectacular games full of physical intensity and genuine drama — and still not have a rivalry. Competition is structural. Rivalry is personal.
A rivalry requires history. It requires accumulated grievances and specific memories and the particular way that certain opponents seem to bring out something in your team that nobody else can access — something darker and more driven and occasionally something uglier than you want it to be. Rivalry requires that the outcome of the game feels like it means something beyond the standings, that losing to this particular team stings in a way that losing to anyone else simply doesn’t.
Portland and Thunder Bay had all of that before anyone’s wife went anywhere. The games between them were appointment television for fans of both franchises — physical, tactical, contested from the first puck drop to the final whistle, with a penalty count that made the officials look exhausted by the second period. There was genuine respect underneath the hostility, which is almost always the engine of the best rivalries. You don’t hate a team you don’t fear. You don’t play that hard against someone you don’t think can beat you.
But then the personal arrived and blew the structural to pieces. And now it isn’t just a rivalry. It’s a wound.
The Personal Is What Makes It Narrative Gold
Let’s talk about what the stolen wife actually does to the story architecture of an entire series, because it does an astonishing amount of work for a single plot event.
First, it personalises the rivalry in a way that pure on-ice competition cannot. Every time Portland plays Thunder Bay — or, later, the Honolulu Trade Winds — there is a specific human being on that bench whose presence means something to specific people in the Portland dressing room. The history between these teams isn’t abstract. It has a face and a name and a betrayal attached to it, and that betrayal colours every interaction between the franchises for years after the fact.
Second, it creates differentiated experiences within your ensemble cast. Not every Pioneer feels the same way about this. Some of them were close to the forward whose marriage ended and carry a fierce protective anger on his behalf. Some of them are more complicated — maybe they saw the cracks in that marriage and have quietly conflicted feelings they would never voice in the locker room. Some of the younger players came up after it happened and know it only as history, as legend, as something that explains the look on their veteran teammates’ faces when Thunder Bay is on the schedule. That variation in how your characters relate to the shared history is enormously useful for creating distinct voices and perspectives across multiple books.
Third — and this is the one I find most interesting — it gives your rival franchise moral texture. The Thunder Bay captain who did this is not a cartoon villain. He is someone who wanted something and took it in a way that caused real harm, and who has presumably had to live with the fallout of that choice just as the Pioneer forward has. That complexity is what makes the Honolulu Trade Winds fifteen books of story rather than fifteen books of obstacle. The rival franchise needs to be as fully human as the home team, and nothing humanises people faster than giving them something they did wrong that they can’t undo.
When the Rival Franchise Moves
The relocation of the Thunder Bay Storm to become the Honolulu Trade Winds is a gift to your narrative that keeps giving across multiple storylines, and I want to explain exactly why.
A franchise relocation carries its own emotional freight independent of anything else happening in the story. For Thunder Bay fans — and there would be Thunder Bay fans, people who grew up with that team as part of the texture of their city — the move is a loss, a small civic grief that tends to generate the kind of resentment that attaches itself to whoever they blame for the decision. For the players who move with the franchise, there is the strange experience of being the same team in a completely different world. For the players who don’t make the move — who are traded or released in the restructuring that typically accompanies relocation — there is the particular disorientation of a team identity suddenly having no geography to anchor it.
And for Portland and their fans, the relocation of their oldest rival doesn’t end the rivalry. It transforms it. Because now when these teams meet, the stakes include everything they always included plus the weight of everything Portland remembers about Thunder Bay that Honolulu hasn’t earned and doesn’t know. Portland plays the Trade Winds and sees the Storm. That layer of memory and loss and complicated feeling — for players old enough to have been there, and for the institutional memory carried by coaches and front office staff and the franchise itself — gives the rivalry a depth that newly minted competitions simply cannot have.
The man who built the Trade Winds in Hawaii — who took his love of hockey and his broken playing career and his considerable fortune and planted an ice rink in the Pacific — didn’t just move a team. He moved a history. Whether he fully understood what he was carrying with him is a question worth exploring across those fifteen books.
How to Build a Rival Franchise That Deserves Its Own Series
The Honolulu Trade Winds get fifteen books. That means they cannot function as pure antagonists to the Portland Pioneers’ protagonists. They have to be a fully realised world — with their own internal culture, their own character arcs, their own love stories and conflicts and moments of grace.
This is the challenge and the opportunity of building a rival franchise that you intend to take seriously as a narrative subject rather than just a source of opposition.
The key is to ensure that your rival team is coherent on its own terms, not just in contrast to your home team. The Trade Winds aren’t defined by not being the Pioneers. They have their own identity — shaped by the strange and deliberate act of their creation, by the Hawaiian context that surrounds them, by the particular kind of player who ends up in Honolulu and what that says about where they are in their career or their life. Some of those players chose Honolulu because they wanted something different. Some of them ended up there because they ran out of other options. Some of them are there because they believe in what the founder was trying to build. Those different relationships to the franchise create your cast of fifteen heroes.
The history between the franchises means that crossover is inevitable and structurally rich. What happens when a Pioneer is traded to Honolulu? What happens when a Trade Wind falls for someone in Portland’s orbit? What happens when the captain who caused all that damage years ago has to reckon with the consequences of it not just in someone else’s life but in his own? These are the questions that a well-built rivalry makes available to you — questions that are only possible because you took the time to make both sides of the conflict fully real.
Sustaining Rivalry Across Multiple Books Without Repetition
A series-spanning rivalry has one significant structural challenge: you have to keep it alive across multiple books without letting it become a monotonous drumbeat of the same conflict dressed in different clothes. The rivalry needs to evolve. It needs to change as the people within it change, as careers progress and circumstances shift and the original wound either scabs over or gets reopened in new ways.
The most effective technique is to ensure that each book in your series advances the rivalry in some small way, even when that book isn’t primarily about the rivalry itself. A reference to an upcoming game against Honolulu that carries a different emotional weight for this particular hero than it did for the last one. A Trade Winds player glimpsed in a way that plants a seed for a later story. A piece of the original Thunder Bay history that resurfaces and lands differently now that the people involved have changed.
The rivalry is a river running through your universe. It doesn’t appear on every page, but it never stops flowing.
Portland and Thunder Bay should never have been able to coexist in the same league without generating exactly the kind of history they generated. Sometimes two franchises, like two people, have a chemistry that makes everything more intense — the competition, the respect, the animosity, the moments of begrudging admiration that neither side would ever admit to out loud.
The captain who went after the Pioneer’s wife didn’t just blow up a marriage. He lit a fuse that is still burning fifteen books later in a city built on an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
That is what a good rivalry does.
It outlasts everything that created it and keeps finding new ways to matter.
Bella Bruce 