I Went to Sports Romance Con

And all I got was a deeper understanding of what it means to be a sports fan

Welcome to Formula Flash, where your local sports column meets Cosmo wrapped up in a newsletter delivered to your inbox via the cool girl next door (i.e. sports and enviro journo Olivia Hicks). It’s like “Drive to Survive” without the sensationalism!

The least romantic place on earth might be the DoubleTree by Hilton in Bloomington, Minnesota, conveniently within walking distance of the equally unalluring Mall of America. From the oversized parking lot, I-494’s tangle of overlapping exits and entrances obscure the waterslides protruding from the neighboring Great Wolf Lodge. Across eight lanes of traffic, the most sensual thing in sight is a Bloomin' Onion at Outback Steakhouse. The most exotic is IKEA.

The setting doesn’t scream sexy. And over the first weekend in March, with winter still gripping Minnesota, it didn't even whisper it.

But the hotel and its sterile smell, set back against midwestern suburban sprawl, perhaps made the best convention hall for romance readers accustomed to ignoring their surroundings in favor of fantasy.

On a gusty Saturday morning, I stood among a gaggle of authors and their admirers at the first-ever Sports Romance Convention.

The lobby was split neatly down the middle. On one end, monogrammed tote bags, sports jerseys and their highlighter-clutching wearers dotted the corporate reception area decorated with blue and pink pastels. Three hundred women, steering wheeled grocery carts weighed down by hardcover novels, peered over a strip of booths selling romance books, vaguely sexual apparel and overtly erotic art — sweaty scenes sketched in front of a locker room backdrop. At one booth, a mother and daughter dressed as elves advertised an upcoming romance-fantasy gala. A second booth displayed bookmarks with a checklist: “Single,” “Taken” and a mark next to “Open to Fictional Hockey Players.” At each booth, the merchandise and book titles for sale blurred into a string of similar words: “Hot Girls Read Hockey Smut,” “Body Check,” “Take a Shot,” “I Like Sports and By Sports I Mean Fictional Quarterbacks,” “Puck Bunny Book Club.”

At the other end of the lobby, members of the Michigan Tech hockey team slouched over armchairs.

The two groups crossed no man’s land only to reach the coffee kiosk line where a couple of convention pass holders slipped phones out of their back pockets to take not-so-discreet photos — the very subject of their dog-eared pages come to life before them. A few brave stragglers in team-issued sweats lingered by the “Hockey Thighs Save Lives” t-shirts, laughing with faintly concerned glances toward each other.

The weekend itinerary included a jersey party, book signings, author and influencer panels and a Sunday hockey game. It was like attending a specific sub-genre of Comic-Con that carried an equally sporty and horny energy.

When I told colleagues and editors I was headed to an event at the intersection of sports and sex appeal to report on the rise of racing romance novels, I was met with an eyebrow raise. And while I laughed along at the idea of a Sports Romance Novel Convention — a caricature of an attendee who preferred fictional men to those with flesh and bones clear in my mind — its existence makes perfect sense.

The romance genre is shouldering the weight of a buckling industry. Between 2020 and 2023, print romance novel sales more than doubled and romance-only bookstores popped up everywhere from Brooklyn to Minneapolis to Louisville. Even as overall book sales shrink, romance novel sales continue to rise thanks in large part to the bibliophile side of TikTok, known as BookTok. But sports specifically seemed to boom. TikTok made hockey romances the best-selling romance sub-genre. Bookstores began to advertise sports romance sections as hockey, soccer, tennis and football books pumped off the printing presses. Hannah Grace’s “Icebreaker” sat on The New York Times Best Sellers list for 65 straight weeks with nearly two million copies sold. A second popular college hockey book series, “Off-Campus,” is being adapted into an Amazon Prime show.

The impact seeped off screen and onto the field, rink and track. Half of viewers who watched the 2024 Super Bowl were women and female fans now account for 40 percent of National Basketball Association (NBA) spectators. The National Hockey League (NHL) reported record viewership for opening day in October 2023. Female fans push upwards of 40 percent of hockey’s total viewers and, during the 2021-2022 season, ESPN’s female viewership base increased by 73 percent.

Racing has seen a similar surge in women tuning in, partially thanks to romance novels and BookTok. After Netflix’s docuseries “Drive to Survive” hit screens in 2019, a flurry of young women and girls took to social media to make driver edits and gush over the sport’s 20 personalities. Some picked up pens and started writing romance novels with a race car driver love interest and imagined a better world where the all-male, nearly all-white sport had female pit crews, South Asian main characters and female Formula 1 world champions. Last year, each of the “Big Five” book publishers released a Formula 1 romance novel. Lauren Asher’s “Dirty Air” series became the blueprint. The hashtag “#laurenasher” accumulated over 415.2 million views before TikTok stopped publicizing hashtag viewer counts.

In January 2024, I spoke with half a dozen Formula 1 romance authors and just as many women whose social media posts reviewing, recommending and creating cult followings around sports romance novels reached viral status. Several shared stories featuring innuendo-riddled titles like “Wrecked” and “Throttled” and said picking up a racing novel led them to buy an F1TV subscription, going “from reading smutty F1 books to crying over Ferrari’s strategies,” as one TikTok user put it. Others began writing about the sport on fan fiction sites and received several representation offers from literary agents. A year later, their fan creations based on one of Formula 1’s star drivers had been typed into published novels and scrubbed of any likeness to the sport’s real athletes.

Images via @sportsromancecon on Instagram

The reception of readers-turned-viewers, and fangirls as a whole, remains fractured.

Traditional male fan bases often poke holes in novels’ sports accuracy, label the genre as “unintellectual" and claim romance readers and female fans bring a hysterical energy to the arena and turn a game into something more akin to a boy band world tour. And, at times, that fanaticism has crossed boundaries. After hockey books broke the internet in 2023, NHL and college teams were quick to lean into the hype, inviting popular BookTokers to games and playing into the virality on TikTok by having players react to particularly steamy, pearl-clutching locker room scenes. Then, pro hockey player Alex Wennberg and his wife alleged that the behavior of readers-turned-fans online bordered on harassment, calling it “predatory and exploiting.” The controversy reached mainstream media, with New York Magazine writing “An outbreak of seemingly harmless thirst became an exercise in parasocial relationships and corporate greed.”

But Kaitlyn Tiffany’s book “Everything I Need I Get From You: How Fangirls Invented the Internet as We Know It,” sees female fans as complex creatives who form community from an inherently anti-capitalist, anti-misogynistic place. Fangirls, according to Tiffany, are a group that rejects the transactional experience of buying a ticket and a jersey in favor of producing art — written, drawn or via video edits — without compensation and often for those who aren’t represented in the sport. Through the publishing industry’s demand for sports romance novels, fans who have been used as a marketing and economic tool by sports franchises are now reversing the roles.

The convention itself was a good example of that complexity. On the outside, pink balloons, too many jokes containing the word “pucked” and scoffing athletes painted a picture of delusion. The scene played into a stereotype: a bunch of bookish 20-somethings and sexually deprived middle-aged moms gathered together to gush over fictional men for the price of $175.

But inside the convention hall, there were discussions about the importance of writing LGBTQIA+ relationships and non-white characters. Authors spoke about the inclusion of trans athletes in romance novels and lectures ranged from mental health awareness to “How to write a spicy scene.” Melissa Whitney, an author who writes hockey romance and is legally blind, discussed people-first language and encouraged sports romance authors to think beyond writing only able-bodied athletes. On one panel, basketball and football authors talked about writing fictional rosters that reflected the diversity seen on real ones. Hockey writers discussed the opposite: making a historically-white sport more inclusive and acknowledging its Indigenous roots. On another panel, book bans and using romance novels as a political tool carried the conversation. As WAG (wives and girlfriends of professional athletes) culture is experiencing a renaissance in conjunction with the rise of the Trad Wife, the convention showed that sports romance novels aren’t as simple as women waiting on the sidelines.

It was as raunchy, sporty and book nerd-filled as my first impression gauged, but also joyful and, as author Jo Preston put it, “inherently welcoming” with women, non-binary people and a handful of men in attendance. If anything showed that romance readers didn’t discriminate, it was the inclusion of even the least sexy of sports: courting a curler, wooing a water polo player and becoming a golf girlfriend.

I drove to the Minneapolis suburbs with a plan to write about the rise of racing romance novels. And I saw exactly that: a NASCAR romance author beckoned me closer across her checkered-flag booth with assessing eyes to whisper that her next paperback may just feature a trackside journalist. A writer with “Norris” and a No. 4 scrawled across her bright orange jersey showed off just how popular Formula 1 romance novels had become with a pile from different authors raffled off. Racing books remained the minority, overshadowed by sports with a ball or a stick. However, the sport’s conquest of hearts across the nation was on clear display.

I left the convention with what I came for. But my brief venture into the world of organized sports romance novel fanaticism seemed to say less about book sale trends or the authors who write steamy, sporty words and more about myself.

In many ways I was the perfect person to cover the event: I have dabbled in sports romance reading, both for story research and for fun. I have worked in book publishing. I have been a fangirl of boy bands and sports. I have been asked the questions all women interested in sports have been interrogated and delegitimized with, like naming all the Formula 1 world champions to ever exist. I have conducted interviews with fangirls and written extensively on the importance and misconceptions of female fandom in sports. And I fit in seamlessly with the crowd: young, female and midwestern. The only thing that set me apart was a fuchsia press pass in hand and a reporter’s notebook tucked under my arm instead of a stack of signed love stories.

But against all journalistic logic to blend in, I found myself wanting to stick out. To separate myself from the masses. To write on my forehead in pink permanent marker “I’m Not Like These Girls!” I think in some ways these women and their ability to be authentic has always intimated me. I have spent considerable time and effort distinguishing myself from them in a sports media landscape that rewards those who act and assert themselves like men.

Tucked away from a rink, a field or a track, I knew beforehand that I was entering a sacred place where judgment should be stored outside in the supersized parking lot with the fast food chains and mega mall. I knew how empowering fan culture could be. I knew romance novels were both intellectual and inclusive. Yet the soccer balls and hockey sticks adorning bookmarks still contradicted the unathletic bookworm stereotype even I had assigned to romance readers.

When I sat next to a duo of college-aged women reading their new purchases, they told me about childhoods marked by playing hockey in Northern Minnesota or just over the border in Canada and how reading about the sport made them still feel connected to it. A steamy plot and heartthrob athlete as a love interest was an added bonus. They both were just as excited about the panels and books as the Minnesota Wild game the following day.

As I shoved my notebook into my bag and stood to leave, one of them set down her new read mid-chapter, snapped an aggressively vibrant friendship bracelet off of her wrist and handed it to me with a smile.

I had been proven right in many ways — about stereotypes, socially awkward encounters and fanaticism — but I was also wrong. I, after all, had spent my adolescent years participating in fandom culture and reading romance novels all while enjoying sports in all their complexity. I don’t know why I thought I was the exception to the rule. Maybe the sports reporter rot finally got to me.

I stumbled out of the half-pastel, half-Michigan Tech yellow and black hotel lobby a little dazed. But mostly just happy to be included.