Exclusive Interview
Will ‘Heated Rivalry’ Author Rachel Reid Write Sequels About Other Game Changers Couples?
What To Know
- Rachel Reid is the author of the Game Changers series, which includes Heated Rivalry.
- She’s written multiple books in the series about Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov.
- Reid reveals to Swooon whether she’d ever revisit other couples in future books or give another pre-existing character a book.
Rachel Reid’s Game Changers hockey romance series is best known for Heated Rivalry‘s Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov. They’re the only couple Reid has written about more than once, in The Long Game sequel and again in the upcoming Unrivaled. But would she ever continue any other preexisting couple’s romance, or dedicate a new book to one of her established side characters?
“There’s some characters that I think could have a book in them,” Reid told Swooon before Heated Rivalry Night at Fenway Park and the release of the Heated Rivalry Deluxe Hardcover Edition. “There’s a lot I think don’t.”
Reid spoke to the possibility of giving a sequel to Game Changer‘s Scott Hunter and Kip Grady, Tough Guy‘s Ryan Price and Fabian Salah, Common Goal‘s Eric Bennett and Kyle Swift, or Role Model‘s Troy Barrett and Harris Drover. “I don’t know that there’s any couple that I think needs to be expanded further than I’ve already done with them,” the author said. “I enjoy revisiting them in the background of other people’s stories, but I don’t think there’s a whole book in any other couple.”
She explained why that isn’t the case for Ilya and Shane, who also play minor roles in other Game Changers books. “Ilya and Shane are different,” Reid noted. “They’re just… They’re special. They don’t leave my head. They just have more story to be told all the time. So I haven’t felt that way with any of the other characters.”
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She continued, “I kind of told more of Scott and Kip’s story and Common Goal in the background, so I like doing that. You’re gonna get more Troy and Harris in the background of Unrivaled, just things like that.”
Before Unrivaled was announced, Reid initially planned to end her Game Changers universe with a seventh book about Luca Haas, an Ottawa Centaurs rookie introduced in The Long Game. In a blog post, Reid announced that she’d scrapped the book, which was supposed to follow Luca’s romance in the aftermath of Shane and Ilya’s outing. It would have explored homophobic fan backlash led by an antagonistic hockey podcast. She’s repurposed that plotline for Unrivaled.
“As I realized that the conflict was going to be mostly backlash related to what [Shane and Ilya] did, it felt weird for them to not be the main focus of the story,” Reid previously told Swooon at BookCon in April 2026. “They shouldn’t be the background characters. And also, as the [Luca] book was going on, it was like they were kind of taking over more and more. I was like, well, this maybe is telling me that I should stop trying to make this about somebody else.”
What Game Changers character do you want to get their own book? Tell us in the comments below!
