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Or, more specifically: where are the Black basketball players in romance?
Every major American sport has had its heyday in romance. There was a time when you couldn’t throw a stick without running into a football romance. Baseball emerged triumphant a few years ago. We’re seeing a new flux of Formula 1 racing romances. Hell, even Pickleball is having a moment.
And hockey? Well, it’s hard to overstate the popularity of hockey romance.
But the most popular American sport, one that has the most teams, the most games per year, the second-greatest longevity, and the most people playing (and able to play) at all levels, has never seen a similar emergence. Sure, we see a few every once in a while, and we actually had a few more when Kimani was a thing. But even with tens of thousands of romance novels published every year, basketball romance—especially when it centers Black characters—has never had its time in the sun.
People will say there are a lot of factors, possibly even including the idea that while football and hockey players can be tall, basketball players are almost unwieldily so, and that’s not easy to manage in a book where non-awkward embraces need to happen. But there is truly one factor that has played into the limited featuring of basketball players in general, and the minuscule featuring of Black basketball players, especially coming from traditional publishing: racism.
Before you get up in arms: No individual racist action is keeping basketball romances centering Black players out of the hands of the public. But the culture of white supremacy that publishing (and consumption) practices are grounded in leads to the cycle of supply and demand centering white players and their love interests, and the implication that this is the only product that will drive sales.
I actually said it pretty well in 2019:
“Even when authors and publishers aren’t being deliberately racist, there are definitely practices that push white privilege and white supremacy into the foreground. Publishers are only buying books featuring white athletes because those are the ones that will sell. Authors are writing white athletes because those are the ones people will read. Readers are buying books with white athletes because those are the only ones being shoved their way. We’ve all heard the same song and dance a million times, but what is publishing doing to make it better?”
Honestly, I never got that answer.
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In recent years, we’ve seen an uptick of Black basketball players in romance, but somehow (at least in traditional publishing), they’ve mostly been women. Black men who play basketball for a living, whether in college or after, continue to be significantly fewer and farther between. They’re not absent! But if I can count them easily, there aren’t enough. The great Kennedy Ryan, whose self-published books saw such virality that they have been steadily picked up by Bloom Books, has managed to pull a fast one on readers by writing a white-presenting biracial basketball player in Long Shot, the most popular book in her Hoops series.
If you want some Black-centered basketball romances, here are a few newer and less new ones that you might want to check out.
Shots Not Taken by Nicole Falls
This is the oldest book on the list, but the Nymphs and Trojans series is definitely worth checking out. Nicole Falls and Alexandra Warren have built a shared world in which they highlight the lives of members of both the women’s and men’s pro teams in Nashville.
Don’t miss an excerpt highlighting the best new poetry collections of 2025 (so far) after these excellent basketball romance books!
Love and Sportsball by Meka James
Conversely, this is the newest book on the list, and it is a great representative of where romance on the whole is going. Using a familiar trope, Meka James introduces us to a trainer who has a one night stand with a beautiful stranger the night before starting her new job with the local pro team. Lo and behold, said beautiful stranger is their star player—in every sense of the word.
Let Me Hold You by Alexandria House
When Leland McClain meets Kim Hampton, he is immediately smitten. But there are two problems: not only is she significantly older than him, but her son is his biggest athletic rival. He doesn’t see the problem, but she is incredibly hesitant to pursue anything with the handsome basketball player. While this is the second book in a series, you don’t have to have read the first book to know what’s going on, but you’ll want to when you meet the rest of the McClains.
Down South Bayou by Aricka Alexander
Before Love and Sportsball, we had Down South Bayou, in which Cheyenne is having a pretty bad day. Before it gets even worse in the form of death by automobile, she’s saved by Harley, a WNBA player. When the pair continue to run into each other, they decide to start a friends-with-benefits relationship, but you know. Feelings.
Cross’d Up by Tracy Gray
Christian Upton is a star basketball player, but something is missing from his life. When he meets Genesis, a nutritionist and chef, he knows his life is about to change. She may be his friend and teammate’s younger sister, but that won’t stop him from hiring her as his chef and befriending her. If emotions evolve from their time together, well. That’s on them.
Jabari: The Crescent Falls Royals by Charity Shane
When Jabari meets Kennidi, he’s immediately all in. He’s a star basketball player, and she has a traumatic history of her own, but their connection is instant. This one has some darker backstories for both of the main characters, so check out the content warnings and read with care.
This isn’t the be-all and end-all of the basketball romance with Black main characters, but there aren’t many more than I’ve included here. You’ll notice that only one of these books is traditionally published—we can dream that with the popularity of Kennedy Ryan’s Hoops series and the increasing interest in women’s basketball, we’ll see more of these down the line. But, you know. Racism.
We could talk about a similar thing with soccer/football, and how we’re only really seeing any in part thanks to Ted Lasso and the Roy Kent effect, otherwise we have a similar problem—in part thanks to the majority Latine population playing in the US and abroad. So, as you’re picking up your sports romances, think about who is playing those sports in the public eye and who is playing those same sports in your books. Are they similarly representative? If not, you might want to work more purposefully to seek out the ones that do properly represent the sport they’re sharing with the world.
Now that I’ve harangued you for a while, if you want to read more sports romance books, check out this older list of baseball romances. And if you want to pick up something new, pick up one of these new trans romances!
The following comes to you from the Editorial Desk.
This week, we’re highlighting the best new poetry collections of 2025 (so far)! From the deeply personal to powerfully political, many of these collections reflect the zeitgeist and introduce some fresh voices in poetry. Read on for an excerpt and become an All Access member to unlock the full post.
How is it that we’re already more than a quarter of the way through 2025? I’m ahead of my reading goals and still feel so far behind at the same time. I’ve packed in plenty of poetry, though, finding lots of wonderful and surprising voices emerging. It’s early, but totally time to check in with some of the best new poetry collections of 2025 so far.
It’s funny how timely these collections are. Keep in mind that publishing moves VERY SLOWLY, so books that have been released in the first quarter of 2025 were probably completed in late 2023 or early 2024, only seeing the light of day recently. So, these collections were written in the run-up to last year’s presidential election. Nevertheless, many of these collections feel like guttural reactions to the world right now. Amazing how prescient art and artists can be, huh?
These poetry collections run the gamut from deeply personal to powerfully political. Let’s face it, those two are often the same anyway, particularly when it comes to poetry. Most exciting to me is how many of these best new poetry collections of 2025 so far are fresh voices to the poetic scene. Let’s dig into those collections, shall we?
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