The Angst of Sports Romance
Ruth Stilling wants readers to sob over and fall in love with her debut hockey romance series.
By: Nicolette Cavallaro
It’s the mission of any romance author to make us fall in love with a love story—the unbelievably attractive yet broody love interest, the emotionally taxing third-act breakup, the heart-racing thrill of that big first kiss.
But for author Ruth Stilling, the goal is much more literal – a hockey goal, specifically. Through her new sports romance series, Seattle Scorpions, the British writer aims to captivate readers with both the love interests and the sport of hockey itself.
Like many writers before her, Stilling, 40, of Derbyshire, England, was a reader first. Before this year, when she wasn’t writing reports as a financial advisor, she was snuggled up with a sports romance of choice with a strong-willed main character and a brooding athlete love interest. To her, the sports romance genre was more than just a genre; it’s an immersive universe filled with happy-ever-afters, game-winning goals, and real connections. “It's what I love to read,” Stilling mentions, “It's what I kick my feet and get all giddy all over.”
That love, along with years studying sports business in both her undergraduate and graduate degrees, led Stilling to publish her debut romance novel, Boarded Hearts, a hockey romance novel, in May 2024.
Since then, the Seattle Scorpions series has taken the reading world by storm, with the third book, Dead Rinker, ranking first in hockey books and tenth in sports romances on Amazon’s Kindle store. The books are interconnected standalones, following the players of the Scorpions, a fictional hockey team based in Seattle. She chose Seattle as the setting for her series since, in the real world, it was the newest expansion city in the National Hockey League, with its inaugural season scheduled for 2021. These novels are filled to the brim with juicy traditional romance tropes – plot points that are classic amongst the genre and adored by fans – like ‘friends to lovers,’ ‘there was only one bed,’ and one of Stilling’s personal favorites, ‘second chance romance.’ While they are not explicitly classified as ‘erotica’, these books do contain sexual content, colloquially known as smut, as well as plenty of hunky hockey players.
These athletic heartthrobs are crucial to Stilling’s storytelling success. Long before she put her pen to paper, she was a fan of the brutal sport, buying game tickets whenever she was across the pond. But, although it is one of her favorite sports, the real reason she chose to showcase it in her writing is the athletes themselves. These players often ride the line of violence and sensitivity, being bloodthirsty during fights on the ice and loving boyfriends, husbands, and fathers off. To Stilling, this makes them easy to fall in love with: “Just from the way the players carry themselves, it just is the perfect formula for a sports romance book.” They are also muscular and always dressed in suits, making them perfect for the cover of any novel.
Stilling has a few favorite players in the National Hockey League right now – Connor McDavid of the Edmonton Oilers and Connor Bedard of the Chicago Blackhawks – and was inspired by their stories as generational talents, a title used for players of an age group with unmatched skills who brought new styles of speed and trick shots to a very traditional game.
She drew from this idea for Boarded Hearts, with the primary male love interest, John Morgan. He, like McDavid, was an outstanding player with no equal, as well as the captain of a team at the tipping point of a legacy. The pressure he faces to uphold this title is seen throughout the book, and his struggle with self-worth is one of the significant conflicts he faces while falling in love. According to Stilling, this empathy and thoughtfulness are one of the reasons he is the perfect ‘book boyfriend’ and why he is so popular amongst fans.
Another aspect of the books that contributed to their skyrocketing popularity was the focus on older characters – adults in their thirties and forties, rather than the usual 20-something-year-olds seen in many sports romances. This is particularly seen in Felicity, the main female character in Boarded Hearts. In this book, the recently divorced mother of two teenagers was restarting her life in Seattle, with a new career after years of being a caretaker. Some of the conflicts Felicity faces throughout the first book include the struggles of being an older woman dating and feeling comfortable with your appearance as you age. Creating these mature characters allowed Stilling to work herself, her dreams, and her own story into them: “I'm a similar age to Felicity. I guess there are elements of myself or my own life experience, or somebody really close to me, and what they might have been through that I witnessed.”
When asked what the future of sports romance holds for her, Stilling chuckles — she’s just glad people are reading her books. She is looking forward, however, to publishing the third book in her second series, The Blade Kings: Total Shutdown. “I will admit, I have sat and sobbed at times when I've been writing,” she mentions, a signal to all sports romance readers out there that this is a good one.
Source List:
Ruth Stilling, Author of “Seattle Scorpions” series; authorruthstilling@gmail.com
Autumn Sexton, WordSmith Publicity, Stilling’s agent, wordsmithpublicity@gmail.com
Emma Lammers, 26, sports romance fan; found on Tik Tok @ emmarosalia17