It’s a new look for Riverton Junior Football (RJFL) in a lot of ways. The old format of NFL teams making up the league has been replaced by a simple color scheme of red, black, white, and blue uniforms, all with black pants.
“With the old Packers, Panthers, etc.. the styles go out of stock,” Red team coach Tyler Watson said, “If we lost a few jerseys we had to order an entirely new set since the NFL changes styles every year. Now if we need to replace a few jerseys, they’ll match.”
The RJFL is focused on developing Riverton football, and aside from a season-ending All-Star Tournament on October 14, they’ll play each other exclusively.
“We wanted to have the idea that everybody is Riverton, you’re just different colors for two years, then you go off to middle school,” Watson said.
The four teams all have sponsors with a pair of coaches.
The Red Team is coached by Watson and Brock Olson and is sponsored by State Farm. The White Squad is sponsored by Wyoming Title Service and coached by Christopher Warren and Brian Blumenshine.
Travis Barton and Devon Scherf coach the Blue Team sponsored by WYO Print LLC, and the Black Team is sponsored by Fremont Chevrolet and coached by Aaron Vincent and David Jost.
The teams will all play each other once, then enter a tournament with first place team opening play with fourth second, and third playing before winners advance to the title game and losers to the third place contest. The Championship Night is scheduled for October 5.
The other new look is a wireless scoreboard at the northwest corner of the field.
“We used to have 15 plays per quarter,” Watson said. “Now we run 15 15-minute running clock, with stops inside the last two minutes of the half.”
In the season opener early Thursday evening Ryan Cassidy ran the clock with a remote-controlled device from a lawn chair with no issues.
“We bit the bullet, it’s a one-time purchase, it should last a long time,” Watson said. “We used money from last year’s Four Seasons Sports fundraiser.”
They purchased the system from Varsity Scoreboards and High Plains Power donated their time and effort to install the new scoreboard.
“It’s easy to use. You plug in the scoreboard, the control connects automatically,” Watson said. “It’s nice you can give it to a parent watching the game and you can tell them to start or stop it. It’s great.”