Need more 'Heated Rivalry'? Read these sexy sports romances by Chicago authors

Chicago’s romance writers are skating, sprinting and scoring as the global success of HBO Max’s “Heated Rivalry” sends new fans scrambling for steamy, sports-themed love stories. Three weeks before the series premiered, former figure skater K.C. Carmichael released her second novel, “The Kennedy Rule,” a Winter-Olympics-set romance between two professional male athletes. The accidental timing has translated into a sharp spike in sales.

“It has been a wonderful surprise,” said Carmichael, who now lives in Austin but honed her craft in Chicago rinks. “We knew the book was special, but ‘Heated Rivalry’ accelerated everything.”

While “Heated Rivalry,” adapted from Rachel Reid’s “Game Changers” books, unfolds on Canadian ice, Carmichael’s story spotlights U.S. Olympians, giving readers a domestic counterpart to the hit show. The overlap has spotlighted a growing local cottage industry: Chicago authors producing everything from hockey heat to football fantasies. Next month The Last Chapter Book Shop in Roscoe Village will pair a romance-novelist meet-and-greet with a Blackhawks game, underscoring how enthusiasm is leaping from page to puck drop.

Bellwood writer Nicole Falls, whose “Nymphs & Trojans” and “New Beginnings” series center Black athletes in the WNBA, NBA and other leagues, says sports and romance share DNA. “Both demand communication under pressure,” Falls noted. “Readers crave that high-stakes push toward a happy ending.”

Genre pioneer Susan Elizabeth Phillips has been supplying those endings since 1994. The Naperville author’s “Chicago Stars” series—following a fictional football team that counts four or five championships to the Bears’ one—released its 11th installment, “And the Crowd Went Wild,” on Feb. 10. Phillips, who helped normalize sports romance long before streaming cameras arrived, said she’s thrilled to see fresh voices expand the playing field. “Within a few years of my first book I spotted baseball and football romances popping up,” she recalled. “Now we’ve got roller derby, wrestling, hockey and, thankfully, queer love stories too.”

Jen Prokop, Hyde Park co-host of the “Fated Mates” podcast, believes “Heated Rivalry” will supercharge demand for queer happily-ever-afters, a subgenre historically dogged by tragedy. “The show celebrates the radical idea that LGBTQ+ people deserve joy,” Prokop said. “Authors like Carmichael are already answering that call.” Carmichael’s December title, “300 New Year’s Eves,” adds another queer romance to her catalog, and she plans additional entries in “The Kennedy Rule” universe.

For Falls, positive representation of Black love remains paramount. “Media often shows us broken images,” she said. “I put healthy, joyful Black relationships on the pedestal.” With real-world headlines grim, she believes escapist romance serves a psychological need: “Sometimes you have to forget everything else and root for love to win.”

Whether readers arrived via a TV screen or a bookstore, Chicago’s authors insist the genre’s momentum is only building. As Carmichael put it while gliding across the ice at Fifth Third Arena for a recent photo shoot, “Romance has so much room to play—and the game is just getting started.”