Let me tell you something that took me longer to articulate than it should have.
I have 32 fully named men’s league teams in my fictional hockey universe. Thirty-two. Every one of them has a complete front office, a full coaching staff, and a team support structure that exists whether or not those people ever appear on the page. I have 16 women’s league teams built to the same standard. That’s 48 organisations, each with their own internal hierarchy and culture and the particular human ecosystem that forms when ambitious, passionate people spend their professional lives in proximity to a sport they love.
And here’s the thing I learned somewhere around the third team: the people in the front office are not supporting characters. They are not set dressing. They are not a mechanism for delivering plot information to the players who are the “real” characters. They are full human beings with their own desires and wounds and storylines — and in my Portland universe, several of them are the women who will eventually become the partners of my players. They just don’t know that yet.
That detail — the women already inside the organisation, already doing their jobs brilliantly, already part of the world before any romantic storyline begins — is one of the things I’m proudest of in how I’ve built this universe. It happened because I treated the front office as real. And I want to talk about why you should too.
The Front Office Is Where the Power Actually Lives
There’s a tendency in sports romance to treat the hockey organisation as essentially equivalent to the team itself — the players, the ice, the games. The front office exists in the background, occasionally producing a gruff general manager who creates a trade conflict or a slick owner who causes problems. They’re plot devices. They’re obstacles. They appear when the story needs them and recede when it doesn’t.
This is a missed opportunity of staggering proportions.
The front office is where the actual decisions get made. It’s where contracts are negotiated and careers are shaped and the culture of a franchise is either protected or slowly eroded. It’s where someone is working at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday night because the salary cap situation has become genuinely alarming, and where someone else is fielding a call from a sponsor who saw something they didn’t like in a post-game interview. The front office carries the organisation in ways that are invisible on game night and absolutely essential every other hour of the year.
When you make those people real — when you give them expertise and ambition and the particular kind of exhaustion that comes from caring deeply about something you can never fully control — your fictional franchise starts to feel like an actual institution rather than a backdrop for romance. Readers feel that difference even when they can’t articulate it.
The Coach Is Not Just a Plot Device
In my Portland universe, the head coach is the father of four of the players on the roster. He and his wife are also part owners of the franchise. Their origin story — how they built this life, what it cost, what it gave them — is the book that sits between my first series and the band series, the gravitational centre of the entire universe.
I’m telling you this because it illustrates something I think is fundamental: the coach shapes the culture of your team more than any player, any general manager, or any owner who stays at arm’s length from daily operations. The coach is the person your players spend the most time with, whose approval means the most, whose disappointment lands the heaviest. They set the standard for what is tolerated and what isn’t, what gets talked about openly and what stays buried, whether the locker room is a place of genuine safety or a place where certain truths are never allowed to surface.
A coach who is also a father — who has watched his own children grow up inside this world, who carries both professional obligation and fierce parental love into every decision he makes — is a character of extraordinary complexity. His authority comes pre-loaded with history. His relationships with his players are never purely professional because the ones who are his children carry everything they’ve ever been to each other onto the ice. And the ones who aren’t his children are navigating what it means to be seen by a man who is both their boss and someone else’s father, someone who knows what it looks like when a young man is struggling before the young man himself has found the words.
Give your coach a life before the story starts. Give them a reason for being in this particular building with these particular people. The coaching staff who surround them — the assistants, the goalie coach, the development coaches — all carry their own histories and loyalties and the particular competitive hunger of people who love the game but whose path to it ran through the bench rather than the ice. They are rich territory. Use them.
The Women Already in the Building
This is the part I want to sit with for a moment, because I think it’s one of the most important structural decisions I made in building my universe, even though I didn’t fully recognise it as a decision at the time.
My front office contains the owner’s daughter. A massage therapist. A member of the legal team. The marketing director. These women are professionals. They are good at their jobs. They have careers and ambitions and a place in this organisation that has nothing to do with the players they will eventually fall in love with. They belong to this world on their own terms.
The women don’t know they’re going to be WAGs yet. Neither do the men. They’re just people who work in the same building, or orbit the same professional world, and whose lives have not yet intersected in the way they’re going to.
I love this so much because it reflects how relationships actually form in professional environments. Not through meet-cutes engineered by fate, but through proximity and time and the slow accumulation of small moments — the conversation in the corridor after a difficult game, the late night in the office when everyone else has gone home, the moment when professional respect tips quietly into something that makes the room feel different. The romantic tension in these stories is earned because these characters already have a reason to know each other before the love story begins.
The owner’s daughter occupying a professional role in the franchise her family owns is a story engine all by herself. The power dynamics she has to navigate — being taken seriously in her own right versus being seen as inherited authority, loving the organisation her parents built while needing to make her own mark on it — are endlessly generative. The fact that she will also, eventually, have a love story that runs through the same corridors she’s always walked in a professional capacity makes that love story richer, not more complicated.
The massage therapist has access to athletes in their most physically vulnerable state — exhausted, in pain, trusting her with the body that is also their instrument. The intimacy of that professional relationship, conducted with scrupulous ethics and genuine care, creates a very specific kind of tension when feelings begin to develop that neither person was expecting. The legal team member brings an entirely different set of values and skills into the building — the careful thinking, the attention to risk, the protective instinct. The marketing director sees the public face of the franchise and the private reality behind it every single day, and she knows the gap between those two things better than almost anyone.
These are not women waiting to become WAGs. They are women who exist, fully formed, in a world that will eventually deliver them a love story. The love story is what happens to them. Not who they are.
Building Organisations You’ll Never Fully Show
Here is the part of this that might sound like madness but I promise has a purpose: all 32 of my men’s league teams and all 16 of my women’s league teams are fully built. Named rosters, front offices, support staff — the whole architecture.
Most of those people will never appear on the page in any significant way. Some of them will never appear at all. So why build them?
Because the teams your heroes play against need to feel like they come from somewhere. When your Portland players face a rival franchise, that rival has its own culture, its own internal tensions, its own way of doing things — and if you know what that is, even if you never write it explicitly, it comes through in how you write the game, the press conferences, the way your hero reads the opposition. The iceberg principle applies to organisations just as much as it applies to individual characters. What’s visible is only possible because of what’s invisible beneath it.
And honestly? Some of those 48 organisations will eventually demand their own stories. The women’s league teams share that same standard of construction because those players deserve a world built with the same care and attention as the men’s teams. Their front offices have their own politics and their own people and their own complicated relationships between professional authority and personal history. Treating the women’s league as fully real, not as a satellite universe orbiting the men’s teams, was a decision I made deliberately and one I’d make again without hesitation.
Your front office is the skeleton of your franchise. Your coaching staff is its nervous system. The players are the face everyone sees, the story everyone follows — but they are only able to be who they are because of the structure that exists around them, behind them, and long before they arrived.
Build that structure. Name those people. Give them reasons for being there. Let the women in your front office be professionals first and love interests second. Let your coach have a history that makes his authority mean something.
Your readers will feel the difference, even if they never quite know why the world you’ve built feels so extraordinarily, stubbornly real.
It’s because you treated everyone in the building like they matter.
Because they do.
