If you found your way here because you've been watching Heated Rivalry — the Crave/HBO Max series adapting Rachel Reid's Game Changers novels, with Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams as rival-turned-lovers Ilya Rozanov and Shane Hollander — welcome. The show premiered at Montreal's Image+Nation Festival in November 2025, and with a second season now confirmed (adapting The Long Game and aiming for an April 2027 air date), there's clearly an appetite for hockey romance that doesn't shy away from real heat and real rivalry.
I write a lot of that. Over 40 hockey romance books across nine series, and counting, so let me point you toward the corners of my catalog that share that same locker-room-tension, enemies-circling-each-other energy.
Start with the trope, not just the sport
What makes Heated Rivalry work isn't just that it's hockey — it's the specific shape of the relationship: two men who are supposed to be rivals, who can't stand each other on paper, and who absolutely cannot stay away from each other in practice. If that's the energy you're chasing, the fastest way to find it across my catalog is to browse straight to the Enemies to Lovers trope tag, which pulls together every book — hockey and otherwise — built around that dynamic.
Then go series by series
Every one of my nine hockey series stands completely on its own, so you don't have to commit to a sprawling, interconnected universe the way some hockey romance readers expect. Pick a team, pick a tone, and dive in:
- Harrisburg Railers — my longest-running hockey series, written with V.L. Locey, thirteen numbered books deep plus novellas and box sets, with the most room to find a rivalry arc that matches what you loved on screen.
- Owatonna U — younger, campus-set, first-love energy alongside the rivalry beats.
- Arizona Raptors, Chesterford Coyotes, Boston Rebels, LA Storm, Railers Legacy, Rochester Copperheads, and Carlisle — each with its own team, its own town, its own slow burn.
The full Hockey Romance Hub lets you filter all of them by series, and if you want to know how the books within each series connect, I've answered that directly: are the hockey series connected to each other?
A quick note on Carlisle
If you've seen "Carlisle" mentioned around my hockey books and wondered how it fits with Harrisburg Railers, that's actually one of the more common questions I get — so I've laid out the difference between Carlisle and Harrisburg Railers in the FAQ rather than make you guess.
Whichever series you land on first, I think you'll find the same thing that's drawing people to Heated Rivalry: hockey romance earns its rivalry-to-romance arcs because the sport itself is built on proximity, competition, and forced closeness — exactly the ingredients that make a slow burn impossible to put down.