I was eleven years old, it was after midnight, and I was sitting so close to the television that I could see the individual red, green and blue triangles that made up the picture on our boxy old set. Color TV had only recently arrived in Australia. VCRs were still a future technology that nobody in my world had access to yet. And somewhere on the other side of the world, at the 1976 Winter Olympics, people were playing a game on ice that I had never seen before and could not look away from.
After that it was one game per week. That was what Australian television offered. One game, broadcast in the small hours of the morning, and I would set some internal alarm that I still don’t fully understand and wake up and pad out to the living room and sit two feet from the screen with the volume turned low enough that my parents stayed asleep. The picture was grainy and the commentary was sometimes hard to follow and I had approximately no framework for understanding what I was watching.
I was completely, helplessly hooked.
That was almost fifty years ago. The journey from that tiny screen in the dark to a 385-page series bible covering 48 fictional hockey organisations has been long and joyful and fuelled by a research appetite that has never entirely been satisfied. These days I can watch almost any game I want, any time I want, from my home in rural Tasmania — a smorgasbord of hockey so abundant it would have been genuinely incomprehensible to my eleven-year-old self sitting in the dark trying not to wake her parents.
But the abundance of access doesn’t mean research takes care of itself. If anything, knowing how much there is to know makes the research more deliberate, more layered, and more rewarding. So let me share what I’ve learned about how to get the hockey right when you didn’t grow up with the game living in your bones.
Watch the Game. Watch It Again. Then Watch It Differently.
Everything starts here. There is no substitute for watching hockey — not reading about it, not talking to people about it, not consulting diagrams of plays and formations. You have to watch the game until your eye develops, until you stop seeing a chaotic mass of bodies and start seeing the structure underneath, the decisions being made in real time by people moving at speeds that shouldn’t allow for decisions at all.
When you first start watching, you will probably follow the puck. That’s natural. The puck is the obvious focal point. But as your eye develops, start watching the players without the puck — the positioning, the skating, the way a player creates space for a teammate or closes down an opponent’s options before the puck arrives. This is where hockey reveals its genuine tactical beauty, and it’s also where your characters live. The enforcer who does the dirty work nobody films. The defensive forward who sacrifices their own offensive numbers to protect the lead. The power forward who wins puck battles in the corners with a stubbornness that has nothing to do with skill and everything to do with character.
Watch games multiple times if you can. The first watch is for the emotion and the overall narrative of the game. The second watch is for detail — the stuff that happened off the puck, the interactions on the bench, the body language after a bad goal, the way a team responds in the first shift after going down by two. That second layer is where your fiction lives.
Watch games from different decades too, if hockey history is part of your world-building. The game has changed dramatically — the speed, the equipment, the tactical sophistication, the culture around it. A veteran player in your series whose career started fifteen years ago played a somewhat different game than the rookies arriving now, and that difference can carry genuine character texture if you know what it is.
Build Your Analytical Vocabulary
One of the things that marks writing by someone who genuinely knows hockey versus someone who has approximated it is vocabulary — not just the terminology, but the analytical language that hockey people use when they talk about the game.
There is an entire ecosystem of hockey media dedicated to this. Podcasts, analytical websites, broadcast commentary from people who played at a high level and now translate their experience into language — all of it is available and most of it is free. The NHL’s official broadcast partners produce enormous amounts of content. Individual teams have their own media channels. Former players and coaches run podcasts and YouTube channels where they break down game footage with a granularity and expertise that will teach you things no Wikipedia summary can provide.
Pay attention to how hockey people talk about the game. The specific words they use for specific situations. The way a particular play gets described at the professional level versus how a casual fan would describe it. These distinctions matter in fiction because your characters who live inside the game will think and speak in its vocabulary, and that vocabulary needs to be right.
Statistics are also worth your time, even if numbers aren’t your natural language. Modern hockey analytics — Corsi, Fenwick, expected goals, zone entry and exit data — have changed how the game is understood and evaluated, and they’ve also changed how players and organisations think about value and contribution. A general manager character who uses this language, or a veteran player who is sceptical of it, or a young analytics hire in your front office who has to translate it for people who learned the game differently — these are all characters whose authenticity depends on you understanding what the numbers actually mean.
Find Your People
The hockey community is enormous, passionate, and genuinely welcoming to people who come to the sport from unexpected directions. The romance writing community within hockey fandom is particularly vibrant — there are readers and writers who have been living in this genre for years and who carry deep wells of specific knowledge that they are almost always delighted to share.
Seek them out. Join the conversations. Ask the questions that feel too basic to ask, because I promise you those questions have good answers that will make your writing better. The reader who played recreational hockey for twenty years and knows exactly what it feels like to take a hit into the boards will tell you things that no amount of watching games can teach you. The figure skater who can explain what edges feel like from the inside, the physical sensation of balance on a blade, will give you access to your characters’ experience on the ice that is otherwise very hard to access from the outside.
Fan communities are research resources. The person who has been to three hundred games and knows the difference between how the arena smells in October versus April, who can tell you what the tunnel between the dressing room and the ice looks like from six inches away because they were lucky enough to do a rink tour once — that person is invaluable to you, and they exist in every hockey fan community in numbers.
I have a person in Portland who answers my questions about the city. I have people who answer my questions about the game. Building that network of trusted sources is one of the best investments you can make in the long-term quality of your fiction.
Read the Literature That Came Before
Hockey romance as a genre has a body of work now, and that work is itself a research resource. Authors like Rachel Reid, Sarina Bowen, and others who have been writing in this space for years have done enormous amounts of research work and embedded it in fiction — which means reading their books is simultaneously pleasurable and instructive. You can see how experienced authors handle game scenes, locker room dynamics, the specific textures of professional hockey life, and then make your own decisions about where to follow their lead and where to do something different.
Read outside the romance genre too. Hockey memoirs and biographies give you access to the interior experience of playing the game at the highest level in ways that nothing else does. The loneliness of a road trip. The specific anxiety of a playoff series. The way a team either coheres under pressure or fractures. The physical toll that accumulates across a career and the relationship a professional athlete develops with a body that is simultaneously their greatest asset and their most pressing concern. These books are full of specific, lived detail that will enrich your fiction immeasurably.
Journalism is another underused resource. The long-form hockey writing published in outlets dedicated to the sport tends to be some of the best sports journalism produced anywhere — deeply reported, richly detailed, willing to sit with complexity and contradiction rather than reducing players and teams to simple narratives. A well-reported feature on a struggling franchise, or a profile of a player navigating the end of their career, or a piece about a coach trying to rebuild a team’s culture — these are the raw materials of the stories you want to tell, presented in their real form.
Embrace What You Don’t Know
Here is the counterintuitive research truth that took me a long time to fully absorb: not knowing the game from the inside can be an asset.
The readers who will pick up your hockey romance are not all lifelong fans who will audit your accuracy with expert eyes. Many of them are exactly like you — people who came to the sport from the outside, who love it with the particular intensity of the convert rather than the comfortable familiarity of the native. Those readers don’t need you to demonstrate your credentials. They need you to make the world feel real and the characters feel true and the game feel like something worth the enormous amount of life your characters have poured into it.
The outsider’s eye notices things that insiders stop seeing. The strangeness of the cold, the almost violent beauty of a clean hit, the improbable elegance of skating — all of these things can become ordinary to someone who grew up in a hockey family and went to their first game at age four. They are never ordinary to someone who discovered the sport at eleven years old, past midnight, sitting so close to the television they could see the pixels.
That child, leaning towards a small glowing screen in the dark while her parents slept, seeing something extraordinary and not entirely understanding it yet — she is your reader. She is also you.
Bring her with you when you write.
She already knows what it feels like to love this game from a distance, to reach towards it with everything she has across an ocean of separation, to find in its speed and beauty and brutality something that speaks to her in a language she didn’t know she needed.
That’s not a gap in your research.
That’s your greatest qualification.
Bella Bruce 