More than just sports

Football and hockey don’t have much in common. Shreveport’s new indoor football team hopes to change that.

The Rouxgaroux, with business guidance from the Shreveport Mudbugs, opened their 10-game regular season on March 8, falling to the Omaha Beef 41-18. A member of the National Arena League, the Rouxgaroux will play five home games at Hirsch Coliseum. Their next home game will be on March 22 against the Wheeling (West Virginia) Miners.

“All the people we hired are Mudbug employees,” said Richard Rodgers, one of the Rouxgaroux owners and the organization’s chief executive officer. “Our game day operations person, our social media person is from the Mudbugs. We hired a lot of their staff to cross over and help us, so we’re running our organization a lot of the same way they run their organization because they are so successful.”

The Mudbugs’ success and hospitality are two main reasons Rodgers and his business partner selected Shreveport over four other cities to set up a franchise.

“We saw this guy on a forklift,” Rodgers said when he got his first look inside Hirsch Coliseum. “We thought he was a janitor or one of the maintenance guys. He walked up to us and asked if we had any questions. We said, ‘No, we’re just looking around.’ My business partner said, ‘I have a question about these box suites.’ (The guy) said, ‘Come back to my office.’ I thought that was weird because what maintenance man or janitor has an office? Then he (Scott Muscutt) told us he was the general manager. He was so welcoming and asked, ‘What can I do to get you here?’ Most general managers just want your money and don’t want to speak to you. We thought that was really cool, that he was all about helping us out and giving us the contact information of his partners. It was more like a team thing. That’s what really sold us on Shreveport.”

You don’t have to be a die-hard hockey fan to have a good time at Mudbugs games, and Rodgers wants to have the same atmosphere surrounding Rouxgaroux games.

“We are very family-oriented,” Rodgers said.

“We like to say it’s a circus with a football game. We know we’re going to get the typical football fan. Our goal is to get the wives and kids that maybe aren’t that interested in a football game and have them come and enjoy themselves and want to come back over and over again. We do all kinds of fun games in our media timeouts. After the game, our players stay on the field for 30 minutes, taking pictures and signing autographs.”

And between games, expect to see Rouxgaroux players — who can make between $200 and $800 a game depending on their experience — throughout the city.

“We’re all about community outreach,” Rodgers said. “We want our players to be very accessible to the community. We want to help out the community as much as possible. We do two team events a month. The players’ contract requires them to go out into the community and do something. Either go to food pantries or go to schools and read books. We don’t want our players to be sitting in the hotel. We want them to be out in the community, representing the team and representing S’port.”

To learn more about the Shreveport Rouxgaroux, you may visit geauxrouxgaroux.com.