Tag: QUeer Romance

Developing a Team Culture: What Makes Your Fictional Franchise Unique

On By Bella BruceIn Hockey Romance, Inside Hockey Romance, worldbuildingLeave a comment

I am not a sporting person.

I want to put that on the table immediately, because I think it matters. I don’t play sport. I have never played sport in any serious or organised way. I am the sibling who sat in the stands while the athletes in my family did their thing, the one who watched from the sidelines and noticed things that perhaps the people actually playing didn’t have the headspace to observe. I have spent a lifetime watching sporting culture from the outside — the dynamics, the rituals, the unspoken hierarchies, the way teams either cohere into something greater than the sum of their parts or quietly fracture along lines that were always there, just never quite pressurised enough to show.

And here is what I know from all of that watching: a locker room is a locker room.

The professional version may smell more expensive and have better towels and contain people whose faces appear on merchandise, but the fundamental human dynamics playing out inside it are not meaningfully different from the amateur locker rooms I watched my siblings inhabit across years of weekend sport. The way status gets established without anyone explicitly establishing it. The veteran who doesn’t need to raise their voice because everyone in the room already knows where they stand. The newcomer feeling out the culture with careful, watching eyes. The joke that lands perfectly and the one that lands wrong and how the room responds to both tells you everything about who these people are to each other.

I built the Portland Pioneers’ culture on that knowledge. And I supplemented it with something that didn’t exist when I was a child sitting in the dark watching a fuzzy Olympic hockey game on a screen I was practically touching — social media, behind-the-scenes content, and the extraordinary access that the Washington Capitals have given fans into the living, breathing, bickering, laughing organism of an actual NHL team.

Those two things together — a lifetime of watching amateur locker rooms and years of careful attention to what professional teams reveal about themselves online — gave me everything I needed.

Culture Is Not What Teams Say. It’s What They Do.

Every franchise has a mission statement. Every organisation can tell you about their values, their commitment to excellence, their dedication to community. This is not culture. This is marketing.

Culture is what happens when nobody is watching. It’s the veteran who quietly helps the struggling rookie with his technique without being asked, and without telling anyone he did it. It’s the way the room goes silent when a specific person walks in — whether that silence is respect or wariness tells you everything. It’s the unwritten rules that new players absorb in their first few weeks without anyone ever explicitly stating them: what gets laughed at and what doesn’t, who you defer to and in what circumstances, what kind of vulnerability is permitted and what kind will cost you.

Culture is lived, not declared. And as a writer, your job is to show it rather than tell it — to let the culture of your fictional franchise reveal itself through a hundred small moments rather than through a single scene where someone explains it.

My younger siblings played sport with genuine commitment and I watched that world across many years. I watched how teams that looked similar on paper — same age range, same neighbourhood, same sport — could have completely different feels. One team was tight and raucous and looked out for each other in ways that extended well beyond the pitch or the court or the ice. Another was technically competent and emotionally cold, a collection of individuals who happened to wear the same colours. The difference was never really about talent. It was always about culture, and culture was always traceable back to specific people making specific choices — usually a small number of people, sometimes just one or two, whose values and behaviours set the tone that everyone else either adopted or struggled against.

Your franchise is the same. Somewhere in your roster and your coaching staff are the two or three people whose character is shaping the culture that everyone else inhabits. Find them. Know them completely. Then let them do their work on the page.

What Social Media Has Given Hockey Writers

I grew up watching one game per week on a television set small enough that I could practically hold it. Now I follow the Washington Capitals on multiple platforms and they give me access I genuinely cannot believe is real.

The behind-the-scenes content that professional sports organisations produce for social media is a research gift of extraordinary generosity. Not the polished stuff — the official highlight packages and the interview clips where everyone is saying the approved things. I mean the other content. The practice footage where someone does something embarrassing and gets absolutely destroyed by their teammates for the next thirty seconds. The locker room celebrations that are obviously partially performed for camera and partially completely real and the line between those two things is genuinely interesting to observe. The travel content that reveals how these groups of men actually interact when they’re bored and tired and crammed onto a charter flight for the fourth time in ten days.

What social media reveals, if you watch it with careful eyes, is the genuine texture of team relationships. You learn who is actually funny and who just thinks they are. You learn the genuine affection between certain players that no official team communication would ever make explicit because it’s just the background noise of shared life. You learn which veterans are magnets for the rookies and which ones are slightly untouchable. You learn the team’s sense of humour — what they laugh at, the jokes that recur, the bits that have been running so long that the participants are barely aware it’s still a bit.

The Capitals have an extraordinary culture that I have studied with the intensity I once reserved for sitting three inches from a fuzzy television screen. They are physically affectionate in a way that reads as genuinely unselfconscious. They are fiercely protective of each other in public. Their sense of humour is specific and layered and has the quality of in-jokes that go back years. The veterans carry themselves with the particular ease of people who have been somewhere long enough to know that they belong there, and the newer arrivals move into that ease at different speeds and in different ways that are fascinating to observe.

None of this is directly transcribed into the Portland Pioneers. But all of it informed how I understand what a team with genuine culture actually looks and feels like from the outside. That understanding is in every scene I’ve set in the Pioneer locker room.

Building a Culture That Is Specific to Your Team

Generic team culture is useless. Your fictional franchise needs a culture that is theirs and theirs alone — that couldn’t belong to any other team in your universe, that is the product of this specific combination of people in this specific city at this specific moment in the franchise’s history.

To build that, you need to know the origin. Culture in sports teams is almost always traceable to founding conditions — to what the organisation was built around and what it was built in reaction to. Was your franchise built on grit and defensive hockey by a coach who believed offence was overrated and toughness was everything? That choice, made fifteen years ago, is still living in the walls of the building even if the current roster looks completely different. Was your franchise built on a particular kind of player that the founder loved — creative, offensive, willing to take risks — and did that philosophy attract a certain kind of character that then reproduced itself through the culture they created?

For the Portland Pioneers, the coaching staff and the ownership structure are the origin of the culture. A head coach who is also the father of players on his own roster has created a family culture that is genuine rather than performed — these people are actually looking out for each other in the way that families do, with all the complication that entails alongside all the warmth. The front office full of women who belong to this world on their own professional terms has created an organisational culture where the assumptions that sometimes poison sports environments never got the foothold they might have had elsewhere.

That culture attracts certain kinds of players and repels others. It creates an environment where specific kinds of stories are possible and others are not. It is the invisible architecture that every book in your series is built inside.

Culture as the Source of Conflict

Here is the craft truth that took me longest to fully articulate: team culture is not just atmosphere. It is conflict engine.

The friction between individual characters and the team culture they inhabit — the player who doesn’t fit, the newcomer who challenges assumptions, the veteran whose methods worked for twenty years and are suddenly inadequate in ways they can’t quite name — is the source of some of the richest character drama available to you in sports fiction.

A trade brings someone into your franchise who was shaped by a completely different culture. They’re a good player. They want to contribute. But the way they understand what it means to be a good teammate is different from the way your franchise defines it, and that difference is going to create friction before it creates understanding. That friction is story.

A young player whose talent is undeniable arrives and finds that the team’s culture demands a kind of humility that doesn’t come naturally to someone who has been the best player in every room they’ve ever entered. How they navigate that — whether they fight it or learn from it or find a way to be themselves within it — is character development that the culture is generating for you.

Your culture is not the backdrop for your conflicts. It is actively producing them. The more specific and real your franchise culture is, the richer the conflict it generates — because culture that is truly lived, rather than gestured at, has edges. And edges create the friction that stories need.

The Amateur Truth in the Professional World

I said at the beginning that a locker room is a locker room, and I want to return to that because I think it carries something important for writers who feel that their lack of professional sports experience is a gap they need to apologise for.

The fundamental human dynamics of a team environment — the belonging and the exclusion, the loyalty and the betrayal, the way status is negotiated without anyone ever discussing it explicitly, the particular kind of love that forms between people who have been through something genuinely hard together — these are not exclusive to professional sport. They are human. They happen at every level, in every sporting context, in workplaces and families and communities that have nothing to do with sport at all.

You have been watching these dynamics your whole life. In the stands, on the sidelines, in the carpark afterwards. You’ve watched teams that had it and teams that didn’t, and you know the difference in your bones even if you’ve never had the language for it.

Trust that knowledge. Supplement it with everything you can find — the social media, the memoirs, the journalism, the conversations with people who have lived inside professional sport. But trust the fundamental human understanding you have already built, because that is what your characters are made of.

The locker room on a bad night after a bad loss, when the room has to find its way back to itself — I promise you that is not so different at the amateur level and the professional level that your experience of the first cannot illuminate the second.

Human nature is the research. You’ve been doing it your whole life.

The Front Office and Coaching Staff: Why Your Non-Player Characters Matter More Than You Think

On By Bella BruceIn Hockey Romance, Inside Hockey Romance, writingLeave a comment

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.

Creating a Home City: Using Setting as a Character in Your Hockey Universe

On By Bella BruceIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

There’s a city I love that I have never been able to call home.

Portland, Oregon sits in that particular corner of my heart reserved for things that are yours in every way that matters and yet somehow just out of reach. I found it through a person — someone I love still, someone I will always love — and what we had was real and true and not quite possible to build into a life. The world we were navigating didn’t have the architecture for us. Same-sex marriage wasn’t yet a legal reality, and the immigration policies of both our countries had no interest in making exceptions for two women who had found something rare and were trying to hold onto it across an ocean. We loved each other. We still do. It just couldn’t be what we both wanted it to be.

So I did what writers do with the things they can’t keep. I made it into a world.

Portland became the home of my hockey universe for reasons that are practical and personal in equal measure. I have someone there I trust completely, someone who has been my eyes and ears and orientation on the ground for years — a person who will answer a text at an inconvenient hour to confirm whether a particular neighbourhood smells like coffee and rain or whether I’ve romanticised that detail from a visit I made years ago. The city just felt right in the way that only the truest creative decisions feel right — not chosen so much as recognised.

But here’s what I’ve learned from building an entire fictional NHL franchise in a city I love from a distance: setting is not backdrop. Setting is character. And if you treat it that way from the very beginning, it will do an enormous amount of your narrative work for you.

Your City Has a Personality, and You Need to Know It

The first question to ask yourself when choosing a home city for your hockey universe is not logistical. It’s not about whether the city could realistically support an NHL franchise or whether the climate makes sense for ice sports. Those things matter, but they’re secondary to a more fundamental question: what kind of city is this, and how does that shape the people who live there?

Every city has a personality. Not a stereotype — a genuine, textured set of values and rhythms and contradictions that residents recognise immediately and outsiders sense within hours of arriving. Portland’s personality is specific and deeply useful for fiction. It’s a city that takes its coffee seriously and its politics loudly, that has fierce civic pride alongside genuine social consciousness, that sits in landscape so dramatically beautiful it makes people feel things they weren’t prepared to feel. It’s a city that attracts people who chose it deliberately — not people who ended up there by default, but people who arrived with intention and stayed because it matched something in them.

That personality shapes my characters before I write a single word of their stories. A player who comes to Portland from a corporate, high-pressure hockey market and discovers he actually likes the farmers market and the independent bookshops and the weird little neighbourhood bar where the bartender knows his order by week three — that’s a character arc the city is generating for me, without me having to manufacture it artificially. The setting is doing the work.

Know your city’s personality. Not the travel brochure version. The real version, with its complications and contradictions and the things the locals find quietly embarrassing about the tourists. That’s the version that will make your world feel inhabited.

Specificity Is Everything

Here is the single most important craft principle when it comes to writing place: vague setting feels like no setting at all.

Readers can tell the difference between a city that has been researched and a city that has been gestured at. They can tell when an author has walked those streets — or found someone who has — versus when the setting is a named location with generic urban furniture arranged inside it. A coffee shop in a city you know is a specific place with a particular kind of chair and a view of a particular intersection and a barista who has an opinion about the neighbourhood’s changing character. A coffee shop in a city you don’t know is just a coffee shop.

This is where having someone on the ground is invaluable, and I don’t say that lightly. My Portland person has saved me from countless details I would have gotten wrong — not dramatically wrong, just slightly off in the way that readers who know the city would feel as a faint wrongness, a sense that something doesn’t quite sit right. The angle of the light in a particular season. Whether a character would realistically take that route between those two neighbourhoods. What the stadium district feels like on a game night when the streets are full and the air has that electric quality of collective anticipation.

If you’re writing a city you don’t know personally, find your person. Find someone who lives there and loves it and is willing to be your consultant. Writers’ communities are generous in this way — someone almost always knows someone. That relationship will improve your writing in ways that no amount of Google Street View research can fully replicate, because what you need isn’t images. It’s the felt sense of a place.

Let the City Create Conflict

Setting isn’t just atmosphere. In a well-built fictional world, the city actively generates conflict for your characters — and not just the obvious logistical conflict of traffic and weather and the difficulty of finding parking near the arena.

Portland’s geography, for instance, gives me conflict I didn’t have to invent. The city is divided by the Willamette River into east and west, and those two sides carry distinct personalities and different costs of living. A veteran player who can afford the established west side neighbourhoods exists in a different Portland than the rookie on an entry-level contract scrambling to find something decent in a rapidly gentrifying east side neighbourhood. Their city is the same city but it isn’t, and that difference in experience creates immediate character texture and potential for connection across difference.

The weather is conflict. Portland’s famous grey, wet winters are not just atmospheric backdrop — they’re an active presence that shapes how people move through the city, how they feel in their bodies, how they relate to seasons and light and the particular joy of a rare clear day in February when the mountain appears on the horizon like a gift nobody ordered. A character who grew up in a sun-saturated climate and arrives in Portland for their first November is having an experience that tells you something about their adaptability and their relationship with discomfort.

Ask yourself: what does my city do to people who aren’t expecting it? What does it do to people who chose it? How does it reward loyalty and resist certain kinds of ambition? The answers are your conflict.

The Arena as the City’s Heart

In a hockey romance universe, the arena occupies a special place in your city’s geography. It’s not just a venue — it’s the place where your city’s collective emotional life gets expressed in its most concentrated form. On game nights, the arena is where the city becomes briefly unified, where strangers share a language and a purpose and the particular intimacy of wanting the same thing at the same time.

Think carefully about where your arena sits in the urban landscape. Is it downtown, embedded in the heartbeat of the city, surrounded by bars and restaurants that live and die on game nights? Is it on the edge of the city, requiring a deliberate journey that becomes part of the ritual? What does the neighbourhood around it look like, and what does the contrast between that neighbourhood on a game night versus a Tuesday morning in February tell your reader about the role hockey plays in your fictional community?

The arena and the city should feel inseparable. The arena is where your team lives. The city is what your team represents. When your players skate out for a home game, they’re carrying something of the place on their shoulders — the pride, the expectation, the history. That weight is only meaningful if you’ve made the city real enough to generate it.

Your City Will Tell You Things You Didn’t Know You Needed

This is the part I didn’t expect when I started building Portland as the home of my universe, the part that still surprises me even now with 58 books mapped out and a series bible that has taken on a life of its own.

The city tells you things.

When you know a place well enough — when you’ve loved it long enough, researched it deeply enough, talked to the right people about the right corners of it — it starts to generate story without you asking. A neighbourhood you chose for purely practical plot reasons turns out to have a history that becomes thematically perfect. A weather pattern you included for atmosphere becomes a metaphor you didn’t plan. A geographical feature that just seemed like good description ends up being exactly the right place for a scene you didn’t know you needed.

I think this happens because real places have an integrity that invented places have to work harder to achieve. When you’re drawing on something true, that truth has roots — and those roots go deeper than you can consciously map. Portland’s particular combination of natural beauty and urban grit and fierce independent spirit has shaped my characters in ways I’m still discovering, three series deep into a universe that started with a love story I couldn’t keep.

I couldn’t build a life there. But I could build a world.

And it turns out that worlds, unlike lives, have no immigration restrictions. Mine is open to everyone.

Your home city is not the place where your story happens. It’s the reason your story happens the way it does, with these particular people, in this specific emotional register. Choose it with your whole heart. Research it until it feels like memory. Love it like it’s yours.

Because the best fictional cities always are.

Why Sports Romance Is Really About Belonging

On By Bella BruceIn Hockey Romance, Inside Hockey Romance, writingLeave a comment
Because the jersey was never really about the game.

The Tribe We Choose

There is something almost primal about the way a person becomes a fan. It rarely starts with statistics or standings. It starts with a feeling — the first time you watched a game with your father and he leaned forward in his chair like the outcome physically mattered, or the afternoon you sat in a cold arena and heard ten thousand strangers exhale at exactly the same moment. You felt it too, that exhale. That’s when the team stopped being a team and became your team.

Sports fandom is, at its core, a story about belonging. We wear colours that aren’t ours. We say “we” when we mean “they.” We suffer through losing seasons and show up anyway, because showing up is what members of a tribe do. The team is a container for something that’s hard to name — community, continuity, identity, the comfort of having something outside yourself to believe in. Psychologists have studied this phenomenon for decades and keep arriving at the same conclusion: sports fans don’t just follow a team, they merge with it. Their self-esteem rises and falls with the scoreboard. Their sense of place in the world is shaped by whether the home side makes the playoffs.

When we understand fandom this way — not as a hobby but as a form of belonging — sports romance suddenly makes perfect sense. Because romance fiction has always been about belonging too. It has always been about the moment someone stops being alone in the most fundamental sense. Put those two things together and you have one of the most emotionally potent subgenres in fiction. You have a story where belonging happens twice: once to a team, and once to a person.

Why Readers Fall in Love With Fictional Teams

The fictional sports team is one of the great unsung achievements of romance world-building. Readers who have never watched a single game of ice hockey will devour an entire series set in a fictional NHL locker room. Readers who couldn’t tell you the difference between a power play and a penalty shot will stay up until two in the morning finishing a book about a struggling defenseman and the team physiotherapist who sees him clearly for the first time.

This happens because the author has done something very specific. They haven’t just invented players — they’ve invented a world with its own rituals, its own hierarchy, its own language, its own sense of who matters and what things mean. They’ve created a community complete enough that the reader can actually feel what it would be like to belong to it.

That is the quiet genius of sports romance at its best. The team functions as a secondary cast that never feels secondary. They are brothers and rivals and witnesses. They chirp the hero mercilessly and then show up silently when things fall apart. They have history with each other that pre-dates the story and will continue after it ends. When a reader falls in love with a fictional team — when they start mentally sorting which player is their favourite, when they feel genuine excitement about the next book because it features that character — something real has happened. They have extended their sense of belonging into a fictional world. And that is not a small thing. That is the whole point.

What the Locker Room Actually Is

The locker room, in sports romance, is almost never just a locker room. It is a liminal space — part sanctuary, part confessional, part crucible. It is where men are seen without armour, sometimes literally. It is where performance drops away, where nicknames stick, where the language becomes shorthand because there is too much shared history to need full sentences anymore.

This intimacy is not accidental. It is one of the defining features of what team sports actually create: a forced, sustained, physically close community of people who did not choose each other but must show up for each other anyway. Over time, that obligation becomes something else. It becomes trust. It becomes the specific tenderness of men who know each other’s weaknesses and protect them anyway.

Sports romance writers know this, and they mine it carefully. The locker room scene is rarely just comic relief or colour. It is often where the hero’s emotional truth is most visible — where his teammates see something in him that he cannot yet see in himself. It is where the reader understands that whatever this man is carrying, he is not carrying it entirely alone. And that, for a reader who has ever felt isolated or invisible, is deeply comforting to witness. The locker room says: there is a place where you are known. There is a group that will notice when you don’t show up.

Safe Masculinity and Why We Need It

Sports romance does something that mainstream culture rarely manages. It creates a version of masculinity that is simultaneously credible and emotionally available. These heroes are physically formidable — large, competitive, trained since childhood to push through pain — and they are also tender. They are also uncertain. They are also capable of being changed by love.

This matters more than it might initially appear. Readers are not simply looking for fantasy. They are looking for permission — permission to believe that the qualities they find attractive in men and the qualities they find emotionally safe in men can coexist in the same body. Sports romance offers that permission on almost every page.

The athlete hero is a particularly useful archetype for this work because his physicality is established and unambiguous. The reader never has to question whether he is capable or strong. That question is answered by the jersey, the contract, the history of sacrifice it took to reach the professional level. Once that credibility is secured, the author has enormous freedom to reveal everything underneath it — the insecurity, the grief, the hunger to be loved in ways that have nothing to do with performance. The result is a kind of masculinity that feels whole rather than curated. Not softened, but expanded. And readers, regardless of gender, respond to that expansion with something close to relief.

Love in High-Pressure Careers

There is another reason sports romance resonates so deeply, and it has to do with the specific texture of high-stakes professional life. Elite athletes exist in a world of constant evaluation. Their worth is measured publicly, repeatedly, in numbers that update in real time. Every game is a performance review. Every injury is a threat not just to the body but to the entire identity they have built around physical excellence. Every season could be the last.

Into this world, romance introduces a relationship that operates by completely different rules. Love — real love, the kind that builds across a sports romance — is not contingent on performance. It does not check the standings. It does not have a trade clause. The heroine (or second hero, in a m/m pairing) who falls for the player is almost always falling for the person underneath the athlete, often the version of him that nobody else in his professional world ever has reason to see.

This dynamic speaks to something universal, which is why it translates so far beyond sports readership. Most people live in high-pressure careers of one kind or another. Most people spend their working lives performing competence, managing perceptions, presenting the version of themselves most likely to succeed. The fantasy that someone could love the unperforming, unmanaged, simply human version of you — not despite your pressures but alongside them, with full knowledge of what they cost you — is not a small fantasy. It is one of the oldest and most enduring ones we have.

Sports romance just has the extraordinary advantage of an unusually vivid stage on which to play it out.

What We Take Home From the Final Chapter

Here is what I keep coming back to, after all the series I have written and all the fictional teams I have populated and sent out into the world: readers do not finish a sports romance and simply close the book. They carry the team with them for a while. They think about the characters on the bus, in the shower, in the quiet moment before sleep. They recommend the book to someone else not with plot summary but with feeling — you have to read this, I don’t know why but it got to me.

It got to them because it told the truth about something they needed to hear. That belonging is possible. That love can survive pressure. That a group of people who did not choose each other can become the most important people in each other’s lives. That being seen — really seen, in the locker room, in the quiet apartment after a hard loss, in the moment before the game when everything is still uncertain — is what we are all, every one of us, skating toward.

The jersey is never really about the game. It is about knowing which side you’re on. It is about having somewhere to come home to. Sports romance understands that. And that understanding is why readers never stop coming back for more.

Why Romance? An Unapologetic Defence

On By Bella BruceIn Hockey Romance, Inside Hockey Romance, Uncategorized, writingLeave a comment

People ask me sometimes, with a particular tilt of the head that I have learned to recognise, why I write romance. The tilt says: you seem like a reasonably intelligent person. You seem like someone with opinions and complexity and a working knowledge of the world. And yet. The tilt is not always unkind. It is just confused. And I understand the confusion, I do, because I have spent enough years in the world to know that romance as a genre has been condescended to for as long as it has existed, which is ironic given that it is one of the most widely read and most emotionally demanding forms of fiction there is. But I am getting ahead of myself.

The real answer to why I write romance is not a manifesto. It is a book. A specific book, in a specific series, found at a specific moment in 1981 when I was at exactly the right age to be permanently altered by it.

The Sweet Dreams series. If you were a certain kind of reader at a certain kind of age in the early eighties, you know exactly what I mean. Slim paperbacks with illustrated covers, girls with feathered hair and earnest expressions, the particular promise of a story that understood — completely, without condescension — that the feelings you were having were real and enormous and deserved to be taken seriously. The second book in the series was called P.S. I Love You, written by Barbara Conklin, and I picked it up and I did not put it down and when it was over something had shifted in me that has never shifted back. From the first page I was gone. Not just into that story, but into the understanding that this — this thing, this particular alchemy of character and feeling and the beating heart of a relationship finding its shape on the page — was what I wanted to do. What I had always wanted to do, if I am honest, because I had always known I wanted to write. Barbara Conklin just told me what.

So I wrote. For years I wrote. For decades, if we are being accurate, which we may as well be at this point in my life. I filled notebooks — not a notebook, not a shelf of notebooks, but a library’s worth, a accumulation of manuscripts that lived in those pages and nowhere else, stories that got the considerable benefit of my developing craft and the considerably less glamorous fate of never being read by anyone but me. This is not, I want to be clear, a sad story. Every single one of those notebooks was an apprenticeship. Every character I tried and failed and tried again to make real was teaching me something I would eventually need. The notebooks were not wasted. They were, with hindsight, entirely the point. You cannot rush the becoming of a writer. You can only do the work and wait for the work to become what it needs to be.

What it needed, as it turned out, was a box set.

I am not going to tell you exactly how old I was in 2014, because I have described myself as a crotchety old lady — well, not that old, I want to stress, merely older than the characters I write, which is the particular occupational circumstance of an author whose cast skews towards the improbably young and athletic — but what I will tell you is that by 2014 I had been loving ice hockey for the better part of three decades and writing romance in those notebooks for nearly as long, and somehow it had not yet occurred to me that these two central facts of my life could occupy the same sentence.

And then I found the Portland Storm series by Catherine Gayle.

A box set. Hockey romance. Hockey romance. A genre that existed, that had novels attached to it, that had been written with the specific understanding that the world of professional ice hockey was not just a backdrop but a character in itself — the culture of it, the physicality, the particular brotherhood of a locker room, the strange, suspended life of a season. I read it and something clicked into place with an almost audible sound. Not just I want to write this, but this is what I have always been writing, I just didn’t have the right ice yet.

My genre, it turned out, had been waiting for me to find it. It had not been waiting patiently — nothing about hockey is patient — but it had been waiting. And once I found it, everything that had come before made a different kind of sense. All those notebooks. All those years of learning to write character and emotion and dialogue and the particular tension of two people finding their way to each other through whatever obstacle the story puts between them. I had been training for this. Barbara Conklin started it in 1981 and the Portland Storm finished the thought in 2014, and everything in between was just the work, accumulating quietly, waiting for the moment it would know what it was for.

So why romance? Because it takes human emotion — the biggest, most ungovernable, most fundamentally important thing we experience — and treats it as worthy of serious artistic attention. Because a love story done well is not soft or simple or slight. It is an act of tremendous faith in the capacity of people to find each other, to choose each other, to be changed by each other in ways that matter. Because the Happy Ever After is not a capitulation to fantasy but a statement of intent: that joy is possible, that connection is real, that the effort of opening yourself to another person can be worth every terrifying moment of the attempt.

And because, if you are very lucky, your genre finds you the way mine found me. On the ice, where it always should have been.

But the evolution from finding my genre to truly inhabiting it took longer than a single moment of recognition, and longer than I can fully explain in one post. It required something I hadn’t entirely anticipated: navigating my own psychology around what it meant to build a fictional world inside a sport that already has a real one.

The NHL exists. It is vast and complex and full of real people with real careers and real lives, and I had to sit with the question of what it meant to write fiction inside that reality, or adjacent to it, or — as I eventually understood was the only honest answer — beside it entirely. My league is not the NHL. It looks like the NHL, breathes like the NHL, operates on the same rhythms and pressures and geography of professional ice hockey in North America. But it is its own thing, fully and completely. The Premier Hockey League.

And when I say fully, I mean it in a way that might alarm you if you knew the extent of it.

Every team has an arena. Every team has a full roster, a coaching staff, a front office, a training staff, a building full of people who show up every day because this is their livelihood and their life. Every player has a family. Every player has a history that existed before the story you are reading began and will continue after it ends. The world did not come into being on page one. It was already there, already running, already full of people going about the business of their complicated lives when the story decided to pay attention to one particular corner of it.

Some of those people are lucky. Their story gets told. You, the reader, get to know them as well as I do — their fears and their loyalties and the specific way they love, the history they carry, the future they are stumbling towards. You get to live in their heads for a few hundred pages and come out the other side knowing them the way you know a friend.

But here is what I need you to understand about the ones you only glimpse: the player who appears in a single scene, the team-mate who says two lines and is gone, the figure in the background of someone else’s story. I know exactly who they are. I know where they came from and where they are going and how they fit into the larger architecture of this world. I know which story is theirs and when it will be told. Nothing is incidental. Nobody is furniture. Every fleeting presence you encounter in these books exists in full, in my head, waiting for the moment the narrative turns in their direction and says: now. It’s your turn now.

That is the league. That is the world. It has taken years to build and is not finished yet and, truthfully, I suspect it never will be, because that is the nature of a living world — it keeps growing, keeps surprising you, keeps producing people who tap you on the shoulder and make clear that they have something to say and you had better be ready to listen.

So. I have told you how it started — a Tasmanian girl, a Sweet Dreams novel, a miracle in Lake Placid, a box set that changed everything. I have told you what I write and why and the particular madness of building a universe from the ice up.

Now there is only one question left. Are you ready to explore the Premiere Hockey League with me?

Why Heated Rivalry Works: What the TV Adaptation Gets Right About Rachel Reid’s Novel

On By Bella BruceIn Hockey Romance, Inside Hockey RomanceLeave a comment

Rachel Reid’s 2019 novel Heated Rivalry arrived quietly into the hockey romance subgenre and proceeded to break a great many hearts. The story of Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov — golden-boy Canadian captain and mercurial Russian superstar — appears simple on the surface: rivals who cannot keep their hands off each other. Beneath that premise, however, Reid built something far more layered: a decade-long portrait of two men slowly drowning in a love they have no language for, no safe harbour in, and no clear way out of.

To understand why Heated Rivalry lands with such force, it helps to know where it sits within Reid’s broader Game Changers series. The first book, Game Changer, introduces Scott Hunter and Kip Grady — their relationship the initial ripple in what becomes a widening circle of queer love within professional hockey. Reid’s particular strength across the series is her refusal to treat any pairing as interchangeable. Each couple exists on its own emotional frequency, with its own humour, tenderness, and damage. By the time you reach Shane and Ilya, you understand you are not reading a formula but entering a world where characters behave with stubborn, recognisable humanity. That specificity — the sense that every character speaks in their own distinct voice — is what makes the series so compulsively readable and so difficult to leave.

The novel is exceptional. The television adaptation, created and directed by Jacob Tierney for Crave and streaming internationally, does something rarer — it doesn’t merely honour the source material, it illuminates it.

For readers who encountered the book first, the fidelity of the adaptation is immediately noticeable. Tierney has spoken about being drawn to the novel’s emotional honesty, and that commitment shows in the creative choices. Significant portions of dialogue appear almost verbatim from Reid’s prose — not as a shortcut, but as recognition that the dialogue itself is the relationship. The deflections, provocations, and rare moments of unguarded truth between Shane and Ilya form the architecture of the story. Rewriting them would have altered its emotional structure.

Where the novel is interior — much of its weight carried in what the characters refuse to say — the series must externalise that tension. Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie solve that problem through performance. Williams’ Shane wears repression physically; you see it in posture, in restraint, in the way he watches Ilya when unobserved. Storrie’s Ilya embodies a different sorrow: a man performing effortlessness so convincingly he has almost convinced himself. The accent, the stillness, the timing — all feel inhabited rather than performed.

What the series accomplishes, and what deserves particular recognition, is its refusal to dilute the relationship. This sounds like a baseline expectation, yet remains uncommon in practice. The central grief — the specific grief of men unable to live truthfully inside the lives they have built — is treated not as flavouring but as the subject itself. Their love, desire, and pain occupy the same narrative space as any central romance should. The closeted-athlete story has existed in fiction before, but often from an external viewpoint or resolved too neatly. Here it remains unresolved for exactly as long as it must.

The novel’s great achievement was always restraint. Reid never offers easy catharsis; she trusts the reader to sit with the discomfort of watching two people fail to save each other before they learn how to try. The series extends that same trust to its audience. In a television landscape that often tidies queer narratives into palatable arcs, Heated Rivalry remains quiet instead of declarative. It simply presents two men in love who cannot yet live openly in that love — and treats that reality as the tragedy it is.

There are minor divergences. Condensing a decade into six episodes inevitably compresses some of the novel’s gradual accumulation. Yet the adaptation consistently preserves emotional truth over structural exactness, the correct priority for this story. Its cultural reception — a word-of-mouth success beyond its niche — suggests audiences recognised that sincerity.

For readers, the series is not a replacement but a second language for the same narrative. For viewers discovering it on screen first, Reid’s novel offers what adaptation cannot fully translate: interiority, silence, and years of longing rendered in intimate perspective. Beyond it lies the entire Game Changers series — each book another variation on the theme of love negotiating reality.

Taken together, the book and its adaptation form a rare portrait of secrecy, vulnerability, and eventual honesty. They show both the cost of hiding and the courage required to stop.