The Best Sports Romance Novels

Could you start by introducing sports romance as a genre, because I hadn’t heard of it before. What’s it about, what makes it enjoyable?

The thing that makes it most enjoyable for me is that sports is quite male-focused and lot of people say romance is a female thing, and sort of trivial. There are a lot of women who love sports—I love sports—but sometimes when you go into sports spaces, it’s very male. Sport romance is a good gateway to merging the two. It’s like, ’Here are people playing sports in a way that isn’t sexist and in-your-face masculine all the time.’

It’s a good introduction to different sports as well. It’s an easy way of learning about a sport if you’ve been interested in it and feel that you can’t go to a game. Like ice hockey. It’s a nice way to feel a part of the community without having to put yourself out there if that makes you uncomfortable or anxious. So that’s why I like it.

Ice hockey is your favourite, but you’re recommending books about a variety of sports. Was that on purpose?

Yes. It was really difficult to narrow it down. I could have picked five for every single sport. For anyone reading this, they might not necessarily enjoy ice hockey. They might be into American football, which I also quite like, or another sport. Much as I love ice hockey, there are so many other amazing books for amazing sports that I know nothing about, and now love because of romance books. So I think it’s nice to have a broad selection.

First up we’ve got a book about American football, which is The Wall of Winnipeg and Me by Mariana Zapata. Tell me what it’s about and why you like it.

It’s about an American football player from Canada who is playing in the US, and his visa is about to expire. He asks his ex-assistant to marry him so he can get his green card. It’s a marriage of convenience, enemies-to-lovers story. She quit because she was sick of how he was treating her. He wasn’t treating her badly, he was just stand-offish and grumpy, and she got fed up and left. And it wasn’t until she left that he realized how much he needed her.

This was one of the first ever sports romances I read. My best friend recommended it to me, but I put it off for a long time because it is a very thick book and quite hefty to look at. It’s a slow-burn romance. It takes them a really long time to build their relationship and develop that connection. You see them come to depend on each other over the course of the book.

Until she leaves, he doesn’t realize how much he depends on her, but towards the end of the book, she starts to depend on him as well. They’re giving away that control and supporting and leaning on each other. I just think it’s lovely.

So this is the book that got you hooked on the sports romance genre?

Yes, pretty much.

Were you reading romance before, just not related to sports?

When I was a teenager, I read a lot of fantasy. My mum loves fantasy, and she used to recommend a lot of books to me. Then, during COVID, my mum and my sister were both key workers. I lost my job just before COVID, so I had a lot of time to myself. I hadn’t read a book in three or four years at that point, so I decided to give it a go. I went into The Works and they had a three books for £6 offer. I wasn’t really into crime books or historical fiction, so I thought I’d give the romance a go.
After that, I read a lot of contemporary romance, workplace romance, things like that. But I’ve loved ice hockey since I was a teenager, so my friend, who has always read romance, said, ‘You should read The Wall of Winnipeg and Me.’ I kept putting it off until she sat me down and said, ‘Tegan. You need to read this book. You’re going to love it.’ I was like, ‘Okay, fine.’ I fell in love with it, and was instantly hooked on all things sports romance.

Let’s go on to your next book, which is Blind Pass by Teagan Hunter. So this is about ice hockey.

This series was the first ice hockey romance that I read and I picked it up because the author’s name is Teagan. Is that a good reason? Probably not. But I was like, ‘Oh my God, there are more of us!’

This is the second book in the series. It’s an accidental marriage book. They get drunk, get married in Vegas and decide to stay married because he is a professional ice hockey player and doesn’t want to deal with the media circus of him accidentally marrying someone. So they stay married and he helps her pay for her grandmother’s care home because she recently lost her job.

I read this book in 2021, and even to this day, there are scenes in it that I think about all the time. He’s a very grumpy, closed-off person—his ice hockey name is ‘the Beast’—and you see him being vulnerable. He’s got a scar on his face that he’s always been really self-conscious about. It comes to a point in the book where they’re trying to figure out why they got married when they were drunk, and he realizes it’s because she makes him feel safe and looks him in the eye when she’s talking to him, and not at his scar.

I’m single, but every time I’ve tried dating, as soon as people find out about my disability, the conversations peter out very quickly. It’s very hard to get past that point. So I really connected with him having that vulnerability and turning to her. You’re showing someone something you’re really scared of showing the world. And she sees him and not the things that he’s anxious or insecure about. That really spoke to me.

What made you decide to not just read but write a sports romance?

I wish I had a good answer. I was just reading so much, and I used to love writing. I used to keep little journals, with poetry and songs and short stories. Then, when I was doing GCSE, my English teacher was very judgmental, and it really put me off. Then, in sixth form, I ended up dropping out of English because I had too much on my plate. I went from writing all these stories and poetry to writing nothing after the age of 17.

But during COVID I was reading all of these books, and I thought, ‘You know, I might write another short story.’ I was lying in bed, and if an idea came to me, I would write it down, even if it was two in the morning. A couple of days later, I would have a different idea. It came to a point where I had four or five chapters of a book. I thought, ‘I am writing, I can actually do this!’

So I wrote a book from start to finish and it took me six months. It was only about 50,000 words. That was the first book I ever wrote. Melting for You is actually my fifth book. The other ones I never sent off to anyone. They were just practice attempts to see if I could do it. During COVID, it gave me something to do with my days so that I wasn’t just trapped there staring at the same four walls. They were only for me and even my family never read them.

When I started writing Melting for You, it felt different. I remember feeling, ‘This is something that I can imagine someone else reading.’ So that’s why I ended up sending it off. I wanted to write a book about someone with fibromyalgia because it isn’t something that you see a lot, and I think it’s important for people with disabilities to write about them. A lot of the time, when you see disability representation in a book, the author struggles with knowing what it’s like to live in that body.

I was 24 when I started writing Melting for You and I was thinking about my future. Do I want to get married? Do I want to have kids? I came to the conclusion that I don’t want to have kids, because I don’t think I could give kids a good environment with my back the way it is. I wanted to have the catharsis of imagining what it would be like for someone with fibromyalgia to have children, run a business and give all of themselves the way that Ellis, the main character in my book, does. It was a therapeutic exercise for me. I hadn’t written a sports romance before, so  I was like, ‘Why not try that?’

And it’s about ice hockey, which you love.

Yes, I didn’t have to do a lot of research. I knew ice hockey and I knew fibromyalgia. So it was an easier starting point than maybe a lacrosse book or something I have no idea about. I wanted the focus to be on Ellis’s fibromyalgia, so I didn’t want to spend too much time explaining the ins and outs of a brand-new sport I had no idea about. So that’s where ice hockey came in.

Let’s turn to your next choice, which is Mother Maker by Jenni Bara. Here we have baseball as our main sport.

I don’t even know what it is about this book, but I really connected with the female main character, Dylan. I’m not quite as hippie as she is, but the whole idea that the universe has a plan—I have to believe that at this point. I was diagnosed with a disability at 15 and depression when I was 10. There’s got to be a reason for all this and I came to the conclusion that it’s so I can share these stories with the world.

Dylan very much thinks, ‘It will all work out. Even if things don’t seem to be going the way you want them right now, they’re going to get there because this is how it’s supposed to go.’ I think because I have a lot of anxiety, I like the idea of just leaving it up to the universe. I can do as much as I can to write good books and be a nice person, but at the end of the day, I can’t force these things to happen. I’ve got to believe that they will and that they can. In Dylan, I see more of what I want to be like: ‘It’ll be fine, you need to calm down’, basically.

How does baseball come into the book?

Baseball is one of the sports I probably know the least about, but a lot of sports people have to travel for long periods. With baseball, you’re traveling for 9-10 months every year. Dylan gets pregnant after a one-night stand with a baseball player. It’s about trying to find the balance between him going to be the father of her child and how you’re supposed to manage when someone just isn’t there a lot of the time.

The scene that I love the most in this book is when he starts talking to the baby in her belly. The baby’s too small to be able to hear him, but he says he’s going to start doing it now, so that by the time the baby can hear through the belly, he’ll already be good at it. He wants to be present and be there for the baby, but it’s hard with all the traveling.

It was just really nice seeing these two people, who didn’t know each other, complement each other in such a way that they feel confident and comfortable enough to share a child and start sharing their life together. She trusts him so that even if he is traveling for 10 months of the year, she knows he’ll be a good partner and a good parent. He trusts her enough to know that she’ll support him if he decides to retire because he doesn’t want to be away.

The specific sport isn’t necessarily important. It was the idea of being away from someone for that long and finding that balance in a relationship that really stuck with me.

That comes up in your book as well, doesn’t it? Liam is off playing ice hockey…

It’s interesting because most people go to work at nine o’clock and come home at five, so it’s very easy to schedule your life around that. In my book, he misses one of the first scans because he has to go and play. He’s missing out on all of those key moments in my book—and it’s the same in Mother Maker.

If you’re married to someone, or you’re dating someone, there’s a bit more room to say, ‘I can’t be here for this.’ There’s a lot more compromise. But when you’re just co-parenting, it can be very easy for the woman to feel, ‘I’m here all day, every day, living this pregnancy, and you get to just galavant around.’ In my book, Ellis worries that he’s going to go off and find someone else, while she’s trapped in the house with her pregnancy, with her business. She can’t go and live this big life that he could so easily go and live.

Let’s go on to Broken Harbor by Catherine Cowles.

I love everything that Catherine Cowles writes. She could write a menu, and I’d love it. I don’t understand how she does it. It’s crazy. I actually can’t read her books or any ice hockey romance when I’m actively writing, because I end up comparing my work and thinking, ‘Why am I even bothering? There’s no point.’ So I read Broken Harbor during one of my off breaks between writing the first book in the series, Melting for You, and editing the second.

He is an ice hockey player, but it’s more about him being a coach for a youth ice hockey team during the summer. I really like seeing that connection between adults and children in books. Some people hate it, but I love it as long as the kid is written well. With Luca, the little boy in Broken Harbor, I love seeing that relationship between the child and the grown-up.

It’s something that’s in my book as well, with Jack and Liam developing a stepparent relationship. I have a stepmother, she passed away a few years ago. It’s that balance of how much can you overstep? How much can you parent? I love young people connecting and being brought together, the family as a unit. I think it’s just beautiful. I love it so much.

In a couple of the books you’ve chosen, and in your book, the main character has a child already. That’s maybe more realistic than the romance books I read growing up in the 1980s, where the protagonists seemed to be young,

single and without a history.

Not everyone is perfectly poised to be in a relationship. Sometimes you need to meet people halfway. If you’ve got a child, you’ve got to meet them halfway. If you’ve got a disability, you’ve got to meet them halfway. I love seeing that compromise and how the building blocks come into place for a very strong and steady foundation for a relationship.

Life isn’t perfect. A perfect person doesn’t exist. Someone is always going to be anxious or scared of something, or they might have a kid, or they might have student debt. It’s more realistic because that perfect, ‘I just happened to fall in love with someone when I was 16, and now we’re 25 and getting married’ doesn’t always happen. My best friend and her partner have been together since they were 15, and we turned 26 this year. It does happen, but it is more the anomaly these days. I like reading books about real people, living real lives that are hard and rocky.

Finally, we’ve got a book about a jockey. This is A Photo Finish by Elsie Silver.

Violet is the jockey in this book. This one I put on the list because I wanted one where the sports person was a woman. Sports in general is so masculine, but women in sports are so strong. Every time I watch the Olympics, I see these amazing women do these amazing things—I just cannot imagine. There’s Rachael Blackmore, who races in the Grand National, which takes place near me every year. She was the first female jockey to win it, and that was only in 2021. It’s amazing to see more women come up through sports. There’s now a female bracket of Formula One called F1 Academy, introducing more women, because right now there are only 20 men in Formula One.

So I really wanted to include Violet’s story of becoming a female jockey and facing sexism from other jockeys. People say that she’s just lucky because she has a good horse. It’s seeing all of the things that women have to fight against every single day. Violet has to stand up for herself and say, ‘This is what I want.’ At one point in the book, Cole, who is the man in the book, is unsure whether he’s going to be able to live with her being a jockey. His dad was a jockey and died during a race after he fell off his horse and was trampled. Cole saw that happen, so every time he sees Violet on a horse, he gets really anxious. It’s a fair human response, but she says to him, ‘I can’t give up my dreams because of your anxiety.’ It would be unfair to her, and it would also be unfair to him because he’d feel guilty for making her stop. She says, ‘I cannot change who I am, so if you want to be in a relationship with me, we need to figure out a way to make you more comfortable.’

If he were the jockey, she’d never tell him to stop. It’s always women getting told they have to change and be the good wife or the good mother. Violet says, ‘That’s not what I want. I want to be a jockey. I’d love to have you there. But if you’re not, we’re going to have to say goodbye now.’ I think seeing her take that stand is really important.