How Cat Disabato Turned Her WNBA Obsession Into a Sapphic Romance Novel

Featured Image Courtesy of 831 Stories

For Cat Disabato, her sapphic WNBA-set romance novel Rooting Interest started as a pipe dream. 

“I’m the kind of person who has more ideas than I ever have time to write,” says the Los Angeles-based author, who until now has been better known for writing mystery novels under the name Catie Disabato. At first, she thought her idea for a sapphic love story about a sports journalist and a WNBA player who fall for each other during All-Star weekend would become just another unexplored idea.

That was until the summer of 2024, when a conversation with her longtime friend and fellow author, Alexandra Romanoff, changed the game. Both women were already well-established as authors—Disabato of mysteries, Romanoff of young adult fantasy—but Romanoff was jumping genres. She’d just finished drafting Big Fan, the first of her three novels under the new romance imprint 831 Stories, and couldn’t speak highly enough about the process.

“Jokingly, I said to her, ‘Do you want to hear my idea for the sports romance I’m never gonna write?’” recalls Disabato. But Romanoff was serious: her new romance publisher was eager to build its roster of authors, and just so happened to be seeking out sports romance pitches. She encouraged Disabato to, at the very least, write up a formal pitch. 

“I sent out a pitch, not really expecting anything to come of it,” says Disabato. A year and a half later, she’s preparing for Rooting Interest to hit shelves.

If you’ve been awake any time since December 2025, you’ve probably noticed that queer sports romance is dominating the zeitgeist in the form of Heated Rivalry, the sexy, bingeable series about the secret relationships of closeted professional hockey players that’s not only taken the streaming world by storm, but opened up a conversation about queer representation in sports media. When it comes to sapphic stories, however, the offerings are slimmer. 

“There are actually very few sapphic sports romance books that exist, especially about professional athletes,” says Disabato. “I feel like I’ve read every single one of them.” As her idea for a romance novel was taking shape, Disabato wanted to understand where the sapphic sports genre was, so she could determine where her book could take it. Instead, she found there weren’t many books to choose from. 

Enter Rooting Interest, the story of Jennifer Felix, a sports journalist reluctantly taken off her NFL beat to cover WNBA all-star weekend, when she finds more than she bargained for in star player Natalie Czapski. But as the steamy season continues, Natalie and Jennifer’s budding romance raises questions about more than just journalistic ethics. If Natalie is married to the game, is she really ready for something more? If you’ve ever been obsessed with rom-coms like How to Lose A Guy in 10 Days or Cleat Cute by Meryl Wilsner—or real-life basketball power couples like Paige Bueckers and Azzi Fudd—Rooting Interest is for you. 

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For Disabato, sapphic sports romance was the perfect confluence of two obsessions: romance novels and the WNBA. Disabato had spent the last ten years writing mystery novels like The Ghost Network and U Up?, about queer women who navigate missing friends, amateur detective work, and even ghosts—but she’d been an avid romance reader for years. She looked to some of her personal favorite sapphic sports stories for inspiration, including Hotshot by Claire Linden, How You Get the Girl by Anita Kelly, and, of course, Cleat Cute. But she also turned to the wider sports romance genre, steeping herself in other queer hits like Rachel Reid’s Game Changer series (the books behind Heated Rivalry) and Cat Sebastian’s You Should Be So Lucky, a 1960s-set romance that follows a baseball player and a journalist.

Women’s basketball is a newer obsession. The WNBA piqued Disabato’s interest for the same reason it’s become wildly popular among many queer fans: the fandom felt like a safe space. “It’s a very queer space, with a lot of queer players, and my own queer friends were already going to games,” she says. Still, Disabato had only ever been a casual fan of professional sports, so she assumed women’s basketball would become another casual interest when she started watching Los Angeles Sparks games regularly during the 2024 season. Instead, “I fell in love with it,” says Disabato. “And quickly became a not-so-casual fan.” 

“The moment that I realized, ‘Oh, I’m in deep,’ was lottery day,” recalls the author. The Sparks had a dismal record in the 2023 and 2024 seasons, putting them in a prime spot to secure the #1 draft pick in the 2025 lottery. It seemed all but set in stone that the team would use its #1 pick to draft Paige Bueckers, a fan favorite point guard (and sapphic celebrity) out of the University of Connecticut. 

“In my mind, Paige was already playing for us. I was so excited,” recalls Disabato. But when lottery day came, another team got the #1 pick: the Dallas Wings, who quickly picked up Bueckers on draft night. “I was so upset that I thought, ‘Wow, I feel really bad. Like, this is going to ruin my entire day.’ I couldn’t stop talking about it and thinking about it, and that’s when I realized I’d never been that emotionally invested in a sport before.” She hasn’t missed out on watching a game since.

But Disabato didn’t just lean on her own obsession with the WNBA or encyclopedic knowledge of romance novels to build Rooting Interest. She also turned to the experts: real-life WNBA journalists. “My love interest in Rooting Interest is a WNBA player, but my narrator is a sports journalist,” she explains. To get herself into character, Disabato sought out women journalists who covered the WNBA, not just reading their stories, but watching interviews in which they spoke about their careers. “There were some things I knew going in about being a sports journalist, but plenty I didn’t know, and I wanted to get a sense of what made them passionate about writing about sports so I could put that on the page,” she says. Elements of favorite writers, like The Defector’s Maitreyi Anantharaman and Annie Costabile of Front Office Sports, slowly made their way into the character of Jennifer Felix.

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Lucky for the author, her confluence of obsessions also happens to capitalize on two major fandoms: queer romance readers and WNBA fans. Rooting Interest is ready to cater to both. It helps that the novel is being released under 831 Stories, an imprint that has made its name catering to fandoms. Pulling inspiration from mega-producers like Bravo and Marvel, the imprint doesn’t just set out to release romance novellas with a literary sensibility; each release is an entire “book universe.” Those universes include plot-relevant merchandise—t-shirts and pajamas that match the items worn by book characters, hats bearing the names of various romance tropes, and even scented candles meant to recreate characters’ apartments—plus online-exclusive epilogues to each book, Discord channels for fans, and, naturally, author-approved fan fiction. For Rooting Interest, they’re going all out. 

“They designed a logo for the [fictional WNBA] team. They made t-shirts,” says Disabato. Three Rooting Interest fanfics are already available online. “As an author, it’s really exciting. Readers will have a different experience. It’s a way to share their fandom and get immersed in the world.”

Still, Disabato says diehard romance fans should expect the unexpected with Rooting Interest. “Even though my past novels were marketed and sold as mysteries and crime fiction, they really didn’t follow the tropes. They are weird, queer mysteries. If you’re looking for something traditional, my books are not going to scratch that itch.” The same principle applies to rooting interest: it may follow the classic celebrity-meets-normal-person rom-com arc, but Disabato says Rooting Interest isn’t so much about following recognizable tropes as it is following one central theme: love conquers all.

Rooting Interest hits shelves January 26. You can preorder it here.