The many broken hearts in the Pacific Northwest this week, in the aftermath of the Seattle Mariners' Game 7 loss in the American League Championship Series to the Toronto Blue Jays, offer a reminder that it’s easy to get romantic about sports. But that doesn’t quite explain the seemingly unstoppable wave of sports-related romance novels with titles like Icebreaker, Pitcher Perfect, and Home Safe. Seriously, have you been in a bookstore lately?

The trend might have more to do with the fact that athletes tend to be young, in their physical prime, and, if they’re men in a pro league, generally without financial concerns and thus able to, say, pay off their paramour’s college loans. So it’s refreshing that the would-be lovers in Play You for It (Penguin Random House, October 21), an Oregon-set sporty romance from a former KGW producer, are two underpaid women.

They aren’t even primarily athletes, at least not currently. One, Jordan D’Amato, had an injury-shortened WNBA career a while back and has just been named head coach of the men’s basketball team at David Douglas University, a stand-in for a certain Eugene school with a very bikeable campus. There was a pay bump from her assistant coach position, but author Samantha Saldivar lets us know she’s not making anywhere near what her male predecessor did. She’s also in a perpetual trial period, according to the school’s athletic director, who worries having a woman as head coach could ruffle the alumni and scare off recruits.

The other, Caroline Beck, is a reporter with the Portland-based Northwest Sports Network, who splits the rent for an apartment with a friend who’s a meteorologist for another local network. A former college hooper, her main workout lately is lugging tripods and TV cameras while wearing heels. While she’s not the scattered mess of many a rom-com, she has her share of issues: Her parents were in the news biz, too, but she worries they look down on her choice of sports as her field of expertise. And she’s not exactly out, even to herself.

Both women working in male-dominated fields, they kick things off by giving each other a professional leg up, with Jordan granting an exclusive interview and Beck (she goes by her last name) taking the coach to the mall to help her pick out some game-day fits. But it’s clear early (maybe a little too early for the reader) that we’re heading into “Do you think about me the way I think about you?” territory.  

As Beck falls for someone she’s supposed to be covering for work, she starts mixing up pillow talk with statements on the record, and things get messy. Meanwhile, Jordan has a lot to sort out in the locker room and on the court if she’s going to take David Douglas very far in March Madness. 

The obstacles line up and, as expected, are cleared away. The steamy scenes are almost wholesome, with the lovers focused on being gentle and making each other feel cared for. Sometimes the action on the court—with its ticking clock and grand release when the buzzer sounds—is more pulse-quickening. Saldivar reported on Ducks athletics for campus television when she was studying journalism at the University of Oregon, and she worked at stations in Eugene and Portland afterward, and that experience comes through. She also offers a glimpse of what women on TV endure, particularly in sports media, from hate mail to the near-constant sexual harassment Beck endures from viewers, colleagues, sources, and rivals. Putting up with death and rape threats seems to be part of the job.

While there are plenty of narrative clichés common to the genre (the chess game of family approval vs. loving yourself, a stuffy East Coast family, a literal stumble into someone’s arms, a certain “schoolgirl queasiness”), Play You for It has some fun Oregon signifiers, too. There’s a lot of rain, that feeling-seen frisson when an author slaps a word like “petrichor” on page one, a college-town bar with wood-fired pizza and surprise live music from a band called the Angry Botanists (probably grad students), a fictional Walton Athletic Center, and some very stubborn bike commuting. 

Saldivar already has a second novel in the works, which her publisher bills as a tale in which “two college softball stars compete for each other’s hearts—if only they can get past their fear of striking out.” It’s set for release in May, right before the NCAA Women’s College World Series. Romance on the diamond? As those tearful Mariners fans know, that’s a natural fit.

Saldivar appears at Powell's City of Books at 7pm Friday, October 24, in conversation with Jen Comfort.