RHI Jerseys: The Wildest Uniforms in Hockey History

For six summers in the 1990s, professional hockey players skated around arenas across North America in the loudest uniforms the sport has ever produced. The RHI jersey — the on-floor sweater of Roller Hockey International — was purple, orange, teal, and neon in an era when the NHL was still mostly red, blue, and white. No tradition to respect. No century of design heritage to honor. Just a brand-new league, a summer schedule, and a mandate to look like nothing else on television.

Then the league folded, and the jerseys disappeared almost completely.

This is the story of what those jerseys actually were, why they looked like that, why originals are so hard to find today — and what we're doing about it.

Why RHI Jerseys Looked Like That

Roller Hockey International was founded in November 1991 and dropped its first puck on July 1, 1993. That timing explains almost everything about the design language.

It was a summer league. RHI played in the NHL offseason, deliberately. That meant it wasn't competing with ice hockey so much as filling a void — and a summer sport can be brighter, louder, and more casual than a winter one. Nothing about an RHI jersey was trying to look solemn.

It had no history to protect. The Montreal Canadiens can't radically redesign their sweater; 100 years of equity says no. A 1993 expansion roller hockey franchise had zero equity and everything to gain from being memorable. Every team was a blank slate, and the designers took full advantage.

It was born in the peak inline moment. RHI rose directly out of the early-90s inline skating boom — the Rollerblade era, when the sport's entire cultural aesthetic was neon, geometric, and aggressively of-the-moment. The jerseys weren't an accident. They were exactly on-trend for 1993.

The league went big, fast. RHI eventually reached across 23 states and provinces. That's a lot of franchises, each needing an identity distinct enough to sell in a market where nobody had heard of pro roller hockey. Restraint was not the winning strategy.

The result was a league where the visual identity did a lot of the heavy lifting — and where, three decades later, the logos have outlived almost everything else about the operation.

What an Actual RHI Jersey Was Made Of

Here's the part most retro write-ups skip: RHI jerseys were real hockey sweaters, not novelty tees.

Surviving examples show genuine hockey-equipment construction, with names and numbers applied in heat-sealed vinyl rather than stitched twill — a faster, cheaper, and very-1990s approach that also happens to be why so many surviving jerseys have cracked or peeling lettering today. League and equipment-maker patches were properly embroidered; documented examples carry an embroidered CCM Roller Hockey International patch at the rear hem and a KOHO patch on the front.

That combination — legitimate hockey construction, budget-era graphics, wild colorways — is exactly what makes them so distinctive, and exactly why they aged badly in a physical sense. The materials were of their moment. The designs were forever.

For the full story of how the league itself came together and fell apart, we covered that separately: RHI Roller Hockey: The League Time Forgot →.

Four Teams, Four Jersey Stories

Anaheim Bullfrogs — the green-and-purple flagship

If RHI had a signature look, the Bullfrogs owned it. A charter franchise from the league's 1993 debut, Anaheim paired green and purple around a bullfrog logo that could not possibly have come from any other decade — and backed it up on the floor as the league's most successful operation, drawing crowds north of 10,000 into the Arrowhead Pond and winning multiple Murphy Cups, including the 1997 title.

They were also there at the end: the final championship game in league history, on August 22, 1999, saw the St. Louis Vipers beat the Bullfrogs 8–6 at the Pond.

Shop Anaheim Bullfrogs →

Vancouver Voodoo — purple, black, and orange

One of RHI's original twelve, the Voodoo ran from 1993 to 1996 in purple, black, orange, and white — a palette that has aged into one of the most sought-after in the entire retro hockey world. The franchise was founded and owned by former NHL enforcer Tiger Williams, and bounced through three buildings in four years: the PNE Agrodome, the Pacific Coliseum, and finally General Motors Place.

On the floor they were relentlessly good and relentlessly unlucky — they won their division in all four of their seasons and never once got past the second round. Zero Murphy Cups. The jersey outlived the trophy case.

Shop Vancouver Voodoo →

New Jersey Rockin' Rollers — green, black, and yellow

The Rockin' Rollers played the Continental Airlines Arena in East Rutherford from 1994 to 1997, in green, black, yellow, and white. They drew close to 7,000 a night in their first season — genuinely strong numbers for the league — and reached the 1997 Murphy Cup Finals before losing to Anaheim.

They also hosted one of the most historically significant games in hockey, full stop: goaltender Manon Rhéaume faced Pittsburgh's Erin Whitten in the first all-female goaltending matchup in professional hockey history. New Jersey won 10–7.

Shop New Jersey Rockin' Rollers →

Long Island Jawz — one season, one legend

The Jawz are the deepest cut on this list. They existed for a single season — 1996 — out of the Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale, and folded after a dispute with the New York Islanders. The name was picked in November 1995 from three finalists, beating out "Gladiators" and "Roller Ducks."

In that one year, Hugo Bélanger put up 48 goals and 53 assists for 101 points in 25 games, becoming RHI's first-ever 100-point scorer and the league MVP, while the team finished 16-9-3. One season, one MVP, and a logo people are still hunting for thirty years later.

Shop Long Island Jawz →

Why You Can't Just Buy an Original

Try to find a real RHI game jersey today and you hit the same wall from every direction.

The league folded in 1999 and took its retail infrastructure with it. Team stores closed with the franchises. There were no reissues, no anniversary throwbacks, no parent organization to keep the trademark alive on a shelf somewhere — RHI never merged into a bigger league the way the WHA did, so no institution inherited its history.

What's left circulates on secondary markets in unpredictable condition at unpredictable prices, frequently with the heat-sealed lettering flaking off, and often with no reliable way to verify what you're buying. For a league whose entire surviving legacy is visual, that's a rough outcome.

What We're Doing: The RHI Jersey Recreation Program

So we're making them again — properly, under license.

Bench Clearers is producing officially licensed RHI jerseys as a series of limited releases, one franchise at a time, in home and away versions. These are not tees with a logo slapped on. They're built as jerseys, in two tiers:

Flyweight Premier — the lighter-weight build in steel mesh polyester. Full team graphics, wearable in an arena or a bar without feeling like equipment.

Elite Pro Embroidered — the upgrade tier, with embroidered detailing. This is the one for the person who wants the piece to read as a real sweater up close, not just at a distance.

Both run a full size range, and both go down into youth sizing (YS/YM/YL) — which matters more than it sounds, because a lot of RHI's remaining fanbase is now buying for their kids.

Releases so far have covered the Long Island Jawz, New Jersey Rockin' Rollers, Vancouver Voodoo, and Anaheim Bullfrogs, with more franchises in the pipeline. Each drop is a limited run — these aren't permanent catalog items, they're releases.

Every jersey release lives in one place: Shop the full RHI Jerseys collection → — home and away, both tiers, every franchise released so far.

The Jawz release also has its own dedicated home: LI Jawz Limited Release Jersey Collection →.

For everything else RHI — tanks, tees, hoodies, shorts, and the full franchise list — the RHI Collection → runs 400 pieces deep and is one of the largest RHI selections anywhere.

Why This Matters More Than a Normal Retro Drop

Most "retro" hockey product is a reissue of something you could already buy. A Whalers shirt is a nice piece, but Whalers merchandise has never actually been unavailable — the logo is beloved and licensed and everywhere.

RHI is a different situation. For most of these franchises, there is no ongoing merchandise program at all, anywhere, from anyone. The choice isn't "buy ours or buy theirs." It's "buy a licensed recreation, gamble on a thirty-year-old eBay listing, or own nothing."

That's the gap we're building into. If you skated in the 90s, if you were in the Pond or the Coliseum or the Meadowlands for one of these games, or if you just think a purple-and-orange voodoo logo is the best thing hockey design ever produced — that's who this is for.

If you want the wider picture on defunct-team gear across the AHL, ECHL, and RHI, we mapped it here: Retro Revival: The Defunct Teams of the AHL, ECHL & RHI →.

The Bottom Line

The RHI jersey is one of the great lost artifacts of hockey design — a full league's worth of fearless 1990s identity work that vanished when the business behind it did. The logos deserved better than to survive only as low-resolution photos in Facebook groups.

So they're being made again: licensed, built as real jerseys, home and away, one franchise at a time.

Shop RHI Jerseys → — every franchise released so far, home and away, in both the Flyweight Premier and Elite Pro Embroidered builds.

Shop the Full RHI Collection → — 400 pieces of roller hockey history, officially licensed.

Browse All Hockey Apparel → — RHI, NHL, AHL, ECHL, and every retro franchise in between.

Also read: RHI Roller Hockey: The League Time Forgot → — how pro roller hockey exploded and vanished in six wild years. | Retro Revival: The Defunct Teams of the AHL, ECHL & RHI → — the full map of defunct-team gear.