‘Off Campus’ Can’t Sell The Hockey Player Fantasy

In October 2024, a few months before Heated Rivalry was greenlit by studio producers in Canada, Amazon Prime Video announced that it was adapting the popular hockey romance book series Off Campus. Set at a fictional Ivy League school called “Briar University,” author Elle Kennedy's series follows four rakish men’s hockey players on the Briar U team as they meet the women who convince them to commit to a relationship.

With Amazon Prime Video already riding a wave of romance show success with The Summer I Turned Pretty , optioning Kennedy’s Off Campus made sense. Around 2023, hockey romance, a niche subset of the romance genre, began to surge in popularity on BookTok. Romance readers everywhere became obsessed—some to the point that they started showing up to NHL games and borderline sexually harassing players during warmups. It seemed like every other day, some romance imprint was announcing yet another hockey romance novel, often taking gleeful advantage of the punny titling opportunities offered by the word “puck.” Kennedy was one of the early pioneers of hockey romance, publishing the first book in the series, The Deal , in 2015. The series has sold millions of copies, and like Netflix’s Bridgerton , each book focuses on a different hockey player on the Briar team, which makes for an easy book-per-season cadence.

I read The Deal in high school, and learned that Kennedy’s writing has all the markers of a 2010s heterosexual romance that leaves you feeling like you might have sent the women’s rights movement back by a decade. She also doesn’t seem to have a good grasp of how and when NHL prospects are drafted, which irked me. Garrett Graham, the main love interest in The Deal , is hailed as a top college player and he spends a lot of time thinking about how he’ll declare for the draft after his senior year of college—which doesn’t make sense, because he would lose draft eligibility by age 20.