At a Barnes and Noble, the location of which he would prefer to remain undisclosed, Bill Kelly putters with the CDs behind the checkout desk. One would most likely profile him as not an avid reader of sports romance. Despite this, he comes across more copies of the books in a day than most people do in a year.

“I’ve actually asked a number of women, and I haven’t seen any guys pick up those books. I think it’s more the storyline. I think that they could be playing lacrosse, they could be playing anything- probably if the guys have nice legs and good-looking bodies, that would be enough of an interest for them.” 

Though romance fiction has always provided a joyful and thrilling escape from reality for many young women, this specific subgenre may not just be a pervasive harm to sports culture, but to these women’s own self-image. 

Though the concepts of sports and romance novels cross-pollinated before, it did not cement itself as a genre until recent years. Popular book series such as Elle Kennedy’s Off-Campus followed the girls romancing the popular, playboy hockey players of the fictional Briar University. Then TikTok came along, and with it an endless chamber of recommendations. So while it started as a microgenre, sports romance became a topic so huge, so undeniably popular, it was getting people who weren’t readers to pick up a book. 

But why? Out of a room stocked full of paperback happy endings, why is the one with the football player on the cover so appealing? It all stems from a fantasy that has been peddled to women long before Icebreaker came into the mix. 

Picture this–you are a seemingly ordinary young woman. Riddled with insecurities, you grew up in a world that taught you to view other women as your

competition, and you never feel like you measure up. In this book, the character is just like you–ordinary, insecure. Until the Ultimate Boy–insanely popular, extremely attractive, wildly successful, desired by every woman he interacts with, the absolute pinnacle of social status–pays her attention. Chooses her from the sea of women, as they look on with jealousy. She has won the competition. 

This pinnacle of desire has taken many forms in books–royalty, rockstar, billionaire. It just so happens that now, that status in American culture is the athlete. Sports viewership is at an all-time high- ESPN reported the average viewership of a regular-season NFL game was 18.7 million people, up 10% from last year. The NBA reported an 86% viewership increase from the 2024-25 season to 2025-26. The boom is especially prevalent among young people, with GWI reporting a 34% growth in sports watched on social media from 2020-2024. Athletes have never felt more like American royalty, and these novels portray them as such. But in doing so, we forget that they are human. 

In 2023, the Seattle Kraken saw leaning into BookTok as a marketing strategy. They began regularly posting “thirst traps” of their players, changing the team account’s bios to “mostly booktok.” They took notice of influencer Kierra Lewis, who had been making videos about hockey romance where she, among other social media users, was using Kraken player Alex Wennberg as a proxy for a character from the book Pucking Around, and making sexual comments about him online. The Kraken marketing team

invited her to a game, and gifted her with a personalized jersey, where she yelled things such as “Krack my back!” at the player. 

“What doesn’t sit with me is when your desires come with sexual harassment,” Felicia Wennberg, wife of Alex, wrote on social media. “Inappropriate comments and the fact that with the internet we can normalize behavior that would never be ok if we flipped the genders around to a guy doing this to a female athlete.” 

But beyond the serious short-term effects we’ve seen sprout from the genre’s popularity, there is long-term damage 

The pursuit of athletic success is an incredibly daunting task- the time and money sacrificed, and the hard work and resilience required are incomparable. But the narrative is reducing these people to a sexual commodity. Young girls are being taught to want nothing more than to be associated with an athlete. Beyond that, almost all of these novels are overtly sexual (over three-quarters of Amazon’s Top 100 Best-Selling Sports Romances contain highly explicit content). This puts athletes in an uncomfortable position–a young kid’s relationship with learning hockey changes in a social landscape where hockey players are sexualized and harassed. Isabelle Knevett wrote for The Paddock Journal, “Real people who have dedicated their lives and livelihoods to competing at the highest level of a physically and mentally demanding sport. Flattening them into romantic archetypes reduces them to tropes in someone else’s story.”

But when all is said and done, despite its toxic side effects, it wouldn’t be fair to say the genre should be completely wiped from existence. After all, misogyny makes sure that any type of media that is primarily popular with women is victim to double the scrutiny. And the books make people happy. They provide escape. So can there be a middle ground? 

The answer is yes. But that starts with a conscious effort for many authors, and publishers, to de-flatten the archetype. The bottom line is, unlike sparkly vampires or fantasy elven princes, college hockey players have been proven to be very real. They are fundamentally different, and can be written as such. More dimensions, more flaws. More representation of female athletes, athletes of color, and athletes with different body types. Less ‘womanizer’ tropes. Less sexualization in general. None of this can happen in a day. But when fiction recognizes these people as people and not golden gods, young women will have one less external commodity to determine their self-worth. What sports stories and romance stories have in common is that they can both be powerful mediums of inspiration. They don’t just deserve to be told–they deserve better.