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It’s PWHL season and it’s Heated Rivalry season, so it’s possible (maybe even likely, if your algorithms are anything like mine) that your feeds are inundated with queer hockey content. Hockey romance has been having its moment for a while, but with the gay hockey show becoming an international phenomenon, what’s been considered a relatively niche genre has spilled over into the mainstream.

Despite the fact that there are way more out queer players in women’s hockey, sapphic hockey romance hasn’t had quite the same boost as straight or M/M hockey romance¹—but that obviously doesn’t mean there aren’t authors out there writing those books. Kate Cochrane is one of them. She’s a former hockey goalie who is now a law librarian by day and the author of the Puck Struck series by night, which has two installments so far—Wake Up, Nat & Darcy and Yours for the Season.

I spoke with Kate about why she thinks that disparity exists, which main character has been her favorite to write so far, and why she can’t imagine writing a book that didn’t feature a current and former athlete.

Follow Kate Cochrane on Instagram or Bluesky.

Out of Your League: You write sapphic women's hockey romance novels. Can you tell me about your books and what kinds of stories you want to be telling with your work?

Kate Cochrane: To this point I have written two books with women hockey players as main characters. Wake Up, Nat & Darcy, my debut, is about college teammates who dated and then spent their post-college careers battling it out on opposite sides of the Team USA- Team Canada rivalry. They’re stuck back together working on a morning TV show covering the Olympics and falling back in love.

My second novel, Yours for the Season, takes a very minor character from Nat & Darcy, JT Cox, the player who took Natalie’s spot on Team USA, returning home for Christmas. Her family is chock full of artists, who don’t really get her whole jock thing and her small town wasn’t an easy place to grow up for a girl who excelled so much at hockey that she took the boys’ team to the state championship. She teams up with her best friend’s older sister, Ali, who she has had a crush on since she was a kid, to take part in the small town holiday contest. And obviously, they fall in love.

With both of these books, I wanted to tell stories about female athletes. I think of girls, like me, who grew up as jocks who took sports seriously and got so much from sports even as we were often told we didn’t matter or our sports didn’t matter the way men’s sports do. Part of writing is reading a lot and I felt like I had not seen stories that spoke to me as an athlete and a queer woman. I want to tell stories about what it’s like to fall in love with a teammate and to strive to be the absolute best at your sport. 

In Nat & Darcy, they are both navigating what it’s like to no longer be an athlete. It’s a hard transition to make especially when you don’t have the financial resources and security of your male counterparts. Most women athletes don’t just retire to a life of leisure because the pay for many women’s sports is abysmal. I wanted to bring that into the story as both Natalie and Darcy and trying to figure out their next acts.

And with JT and Ali, I wanted to explore what it’s like for a jock to be the odd man out in a family. Growing up, there are so many stories about kids who aren’t athletes in a family that only understands sports so I wanted to flip that a little and show a world class athlete who has a family who is like, “yeah but what art are you making?”

OOYL: What is your relationship to the sport of hockey?

KC: I started playing hockey when I was eight or nine. I skated once at a friend’s house who had a backyard rink and came home begging my parents to let me play. I was the only girl in the entire league basically until I started playing on a girls’ team in middle school. I just loved it. I wanted to play goalie because they have the coolest gear and because they never had to leave the ice. They got to play the entire game and that seemed like a good deal to me.

I was recruited to play in college and played for four years. My junior year we were the number one team in the country for most of the season. We went to the first women’s Frozen Four which was very cool until we got our swag which were vests designed to fit giant men and which had the word “inaugural” spelled wrong. You can’t make some of this stuff up. We felt like we’d conquered the world only to find out the NCAA couldn’t be bothered to give us gear that fit or that was spelled correctly. 

Ice hockey, being a goalie, was a huge part of my identity and when it ended, I didn’t really know how to think of myself. That’s something I could bring with me to Nat & Darcy (though I never played on a National Team or in the Olympics). It’s a hard transition and can take a long time to grieve. Writing about sports brings me back to it in a new way.

OOYL: Between the four main characters in your two novels, do you have a favorite character and why?

KC: This is such a hard question! I love them all for different reasons. I think many of them have parts of me sort of mixed in. I loved writing Natalie and Darcy because of their history as teammates and their rivalry and trash talking. I think Natalie has been the character that most readers have found most annoying, but I love her. She’s an immature smart-ass who isn’t sure how to express her feelings for most of the book. I know that annoyed a lot of people, but I really do love her because she’s trying (and doing so badly).

And Coxie I love because I put so much of my own experience of growing up in a small town, in rural New Hampshire into her. She’s been treated pretty terribly by folks in her small town who didn’t get her but she’s somehow found a way to remain a big, old golden retriever of a person. She’s goofy and kind and full of heart in spite of coming from a place that didn’t always treat her well or know how to celebrate her. 

OOYL: Obviously, Heated Rivalry has become a phenomenon and hockey romance more generally is one of the biggest subgenres. Sapphic woho romance stories haven't enjoyed the same platform or profile, especially from straight women who make up so much of the hockey romance audience. Why do you think that is?

KC: This is the question isn’t it? Why are stories about men so much bigger than those about women? I mean, misogyny, patriarchy, all those things of course. But more specifically, I think there’s a feeling that women, who are the biggest consumers of romance novels, like men who seem gruff and tough and macho on the outside but are sweet and tender on the inside. I think hockey stories play into that sort of gladiator mentality where the players literally fight on the ice and then in m/m stories are romantic and tender off the ice. I’m not a straight woman, but my sense is that’s very attractive to a certain set of women who are attracted to men. 

As for why don't sapphic hockey stories get the same attention? I really don’t know. I certainly don’t subscribe to the idea that it’s okay for women’s sports stories to take a backseat because the men don’t have the real life equivalent of Marie-Phillip Poulin and Laura Stacey, or any of the several Team USA/Team Canada married couples. I think that’s absurd. Having real life couples in women’s hockey (either on the same team or rivals) doesn’t mean we don’t need fictional stories as well. Fiction, whether it’s books or TV, allows us to delve into feelings and thoughts and lived experiences you can’t get from watching a game or reading an interview. It’s a place to explore and to linger in someone else’s world and in someone else’s head in a way that you can’t in real life without being wildly invasive to real people.

I hope that folks who are hungry for more hockey will pick up sapphic books. Women’s hockey is not the same as men’s hockey. The game itself is different but so are the issues that women deal with, including not making millions of dollars or always having the support of billion dollar businesses behind you. I think many women, who love romance novels, can probably relate to the struggle of professionals struggling against a sexist system or rigid expectations.

And I’d be remiss not to mention that this is not like asking people to eat their vegetables! I grew up experiencing so much homophobia in the form of fear that lesbians were scary and predatory that sometimes I forget to mention that sapphic romances are hot and sexy and romantic. People will likely find some they like and some they hate and some that fall in the middle just like any other genre. But the books are good! We’re out here trying to make our readers laugh, and swoon and feel that yearning they love so much. These women are in peak physical condition for their sports. They’re capable of amazing feats of speed and strength and finesse. If that’s not hot, I don’t really know what is. 

OOYL: Why do you think writing sapphic woho romance stories is important?

KC: I can’t imagine writing a story where none of my characters were athletes. Currently, I have written two books with hockey players as the main characters. I’m working on another. In the future, I have ideas for other sports. I am drawn to these current or former athletes because I think we are different from non-athletes. There is a rhythm to our banter, a way of communicating with teasing and shit talk, and affection that I haven’t found in any of my non-athletic pursuits. 

Personally, I find writing cathartic and therapeutic. It can be a way of thinking about how things were back in a time when I had teammates threaten to quit when I came out. Sometimes people look at women’s hockey and are like “welp, they’ve solved homophobia because there are some couples out there.” And that’s not true. There are out queer players in numbers I would have never dreamed of when I was playing. There are players showing their wedding pictures and their pregnant wives and partners and their itty bitty babies and it’s so lovely to see. But it’s not like there aren’t still struggles for queer players. 

There are so many stories here that maybe people think are nothing big because there are these couples who are out and happy. But there are so many stories we haven’t seen yet. Like what does it look like when you fall in love with your teammate? How does the team deal with that? What happens when she gets traded? I want all those stories. I am greedy enough to want every single one. 

And I haven’t even touched on the ongoing threats to trans players. I’m a cis woman so I’m not the person to tell those stories but I want to read them. I want the stories from nonbinary players and trans players and what it’s like to check a transphobe through the boards and hear the crowd cheering like you just won the Super Bowl. I want all those stories, in women’s hockey and in all of women’s sports.

OOYL: Anything else you want to share?

KC: People keep talking about how women’s sports are having a moment. That moment hasn’t migrated to women’s sports romance as much as I would want. Like I said, I’m greedy. But I believe there’s an audience for women’s sports romance, they just have to be able to find these books. I hope when they do they read a few and find some that they love. Whether they’re my books or someone else’s, I hope people will give them a try and feed their love and curiosity for women’s sports and women’s love stories in fiction as well as in watching the PWHL, the WNBA, the Olympics, and everywhere else. 

I hope folks who discover women’s sports romances and who like them will tell their friends about them. Part of the fun for Heated Rivalry fans is the community around the books and now each episode dropping. If you find a book you liked and thought was hot or romantic or funny or sad (whatever you personally enjoy) please tell your friends or coworkers about it. In the same way many folks were in their group chats talking about Team USA sweeping the Rivalry Series this year, or Caitlin Clark launching a bomb from half court, or MPP being a problem on the ice, you can create community by sharing what you like. 

Follow Kate Cochrane on Instagram or Bluesky.