Exclusive Interview
‘Heated Rivalry’ Author Rachel Reid on How Scrapped Game Changers Book Led to ‘Unrivaled’
What To Know
- Author Rachel Reid scrapped a planned Game Changers book focused on rookie Luca Haas.
- Reid decided to continue the series with Unrivaled, which centers on fan-favorite couple Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov.
- Reid tells Swooon about how the Luca book is connected to Unrivaled.
Before there was Unrivaled, there was the untitled Luca Haas book.
Author Rachel Reid almost concluded her Game Changers hockey romance series — which includes her breakout hit Heated Rivalry — with The Long Game. After that one came out, Reid spent two years writing a follow-up about Ottawa Centaurs rookie Luca. In February 2025, she announced that she’d scrapped the story and considered her series complete. About a year later, the author shared that the Game Changers series would continue after all, in the form of a third book about Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov.
The blurb for Unrivaled, which is due out in June 2027, reveals some similarities to what Reid had planned for Luca’s book. In a February 2025 blog post, the author described what would’ve happened and why it wasn’t working. “This book could also follow the Centaurs for another season, and give the team their happy ending [Stanley Cup],” she wrote. “My idea was to have the conflict come largely from homophobic fan backlash, led by a popular hockey podcast. And meanwhile Luca could have a sweet little romance.”
It was in the process of writing the Luca book that Reid realized there was more story to tell with Shane and Ilya. After their relationship is outed to the world, The Long Game ends with Shane and Ilya marrying and playing together for the Centaurs, their first season together just about to begin. Unrivaled will see the couple enjoying their new life out in the open — which Reid assured us there are plenty of cute Hollanov teammate moments — but they’ll also be up against people who don’t support them.
“As I realized that the conflict was going to be mostly backlash related to what they did, it felt weird for them to not be the main focus of the story,” Reid told Swooon at BookCon on April 19. “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.”
In her blog post, Reid explained that part of the reason she abandoned the Luca book was because she didn’t want to “take away from Shane and Ilya’s big happy ending.” She added, “Truthfully, I could easily have written a mediocre book about Luca and packed it full of Ilya and Shane appearances, and I’m sure it would have sold well, but it would have been a terrible way to end the series. I did enjoy writing the characters again when I was trying to write Luca’s book, so you can expect to see some short stories.”
When Reid decided to pivot to Unrivaled, she spent the early stages trying to repurpose quite a few scenes from that project. “Because I noticed when I was writing the Luca book, or trying to, the best scenes were the Ilya and Shane ones, of course,” she told Swooon. “So I was like, well, maybe they should be the main characters. So, I’m not using exact stuff that I wrote, but I’m taking those scenes, obviously writing another character’s point of view, and taking the ideas and rewriting them.”
All in all, though, don’t expect Unrivaled to be too similar to the Luca book. “There’s a couple jokes that stayed in that I liked [and] a few lines that are staying in, but for the most part, it’s a pretty different book,” Reid said. “It is set over the same timeline, so I was able to kind of use parts of it and the podcast.”
