(Riverton, WY) – Bo Perry came to Riverton five years ago for a woman he’d met on Facebook. They’d talked for months across the distance between Connecticut and Wyoming before deciding to build a life together. They married that December, but by the following summer, the marriage was over.
Without her, he had no one in Wyoming. His family was all back in Connecticut, his son was finishing his sophomore year, and Bo had quit his job to make the move. He thought seriously about going home, but something in his faith told him not to.
“The Lord said, ‘This is where I want you to be,'” Bo says. “It doesn’t matter how the journey started. I’m here now.”
Bo grew up in Groton, Connecticut. His father worked at General Dynamics building submarines. His mother supervised a unit for people with mental illness. They raised three athletes who all went to college on scholarships, and Bo played football from Pop Warner through college at Northern Arizona, where he ran for over 800 yards in the Big Sky Conference after sitting out a full year following knee surgery that doctors told him would end his career. He signed with the USFL out of college but his knees gave out again and he headed home – his football days done sooner than he’d dreamt.
“Who am I now?” he says. “That was the question.”
Without the game, Bo struggled to find purpose. Someone introduced him to a substance, and for a while, it made him forget how his football life had been derailed. It took years, a family that wouldn’t quit on him, and a pastor who kept believing in him before he came out the other side.
From 2007-2017, he became sober and went to work at Teen Challenge, a faith-based drug and alcohol program in the inner cities of New Haven and Bridgeport, working with troubled teens because he understood something about being in trouble. He built a community outreach in Connecticut called Stop the Madness, put together events in local parks, brought in performers, gave away prizes, and watched kids show up who needed somewhere to be. He was doing that work when he got on a plane headed for Wyoming and his new relationship.
The divorce hit Bo hard, and after it was finalized he went back to Connecticut and relapsed. He sought help, got his footing back, and eventually returned to Riverton. His director at the Fremont County Boys Home, Dana Flint, rehired him. He has not looked back since.
The Boys Home takes in boys between 10 and 18. They’re there because something is wrong at home, and it isn’t safe for them to stay, or because their behavior has gotten to a point where the family needs outside help. Some stay a few weeks. Some stay two years. It depends on how long it takes for the adults in their lives to get things sorted out. There are four boys in the home right now, a little under average, and Flint has run the place for eight years through funding gaps, staffing problems, and everything else that comes with doing this kind of work. She hired Bo because he had the experience and because she recognized something in him that this work requires and that you can’t teach.
“Everybody loves Bo,” she says.
The boys have their own name for him. They call him the preacher, not quite as a joke but not entirely seriously either. Maybe in the way teenagers name the things they respect but can’t quite bring themselves to say they respect. Bo runs a nightly curriculum at the dinner table, working through topics like anger, fear, and resentment, and he pulls from his own life because the boys can tell the difference between someone who has been through something and someone reading from a script to get a paycheck.
“I put my own life story in it,” Bo says. “To show them it’s okay to not feel okay. I’m just like you.”
Sincere is 16 and has been at the home long enough to know who to go to when something is bothering him. When something is bothering him, he goes to Bo. “He’s given me good advice,” Riley says. “Coping through stuff.”
Carlos is 14 and came into the home without good shoes, so Bo got him new ones. When Miles got kicked off the basketball team, Bo worked with his coach and helped get him back on.
Payton is 16 and a new member on the high school track team. He was out in the field behind the house on a recent evening practicing throwing discus by himself. He works at a local restaurant, saves his money, buys his own things, and has become an ‘A’ student.
“He’s been more of a father figure for me than anybody in my life,” Payton says of Bo. “He takes me to track practice and to work. He feeds us too. If something is wrong, he’s the one in the house who wants to talk about it.”
Bo works the 2 to 10 shift, five days a week, which puts him there when the boys come home from school and keeps him through homework hour, dinner, curriculum, and whatever the evening brings. He regularly stays with the boys over the holidays.
“Those boys are my family,” he says. “I’ll tell them that.”
The gym is an integral part of Bo’s community too. Bo has worked out at Ironworks Gym in Riverton for the past four years and has become as much a fixture there as he has at the Boys Home. He brings the boys in sometimes to hit the bag or lift weights, and the gym offers discounts to boys who earn them with good behavior.
Kami Cunningham, the owner of Iron Works, is a bodybuilder and a good friend of Bo’s. She lost her husband and business partner to cancer not long after they opened the gym together, so she knows what it means to keep going when things get hard.
“When you have somebody who’s just a good person, you can just tell,” she says. “That was our first impression of Bo. He’s touching them (The boys at the group home) in a way that makes a difference in their heart and gives them a reason to fight for themselves… It’s so important to teach that young boy that he matters.”
Troy Brown, a trainer at Ironworks and one of Bo’s first friends in Riverton, puts it more simply when he describes Bo with the group home kids at the gym. “He’s always a positive influence on them,” Troy says. “Friendly, but stern. Which is what a good coach would do.”
Bo has been clean for five years and will tell you that himself. He tells the boys at the home, too, because being honest about where he’s been is part of what makes him relatable to them. The phrase he’s carried longest, the one that started as a private prayer during all those knee surgeries and recoveries in college, is “keep me running, Lord.” He wrote it in a notebook years ago alongside other lines that came to him during the hard years. “You gotta have guts to go the distance. If you believe God, then trust God.” He always knew they’d end up on a shirt.
When he shared the idea with people around Riverton, an accountant did the paperwork for free because she believed in what he was trying to do. A designer helped bring the shirts to life. Now his website is up, and the shirts are selling.
The plan is to use the money to fund community events, starting with a flag football tournament open to kids ages 10 to 15, boys and girls, at the high school, with raffles and giveaways and a word said at the start about who these kids are and why it matters that they showed up. After the flag football tournament, Bo has a drama he’s been writing in his head for years about high school kids and drugs and what can happen instead. “I’ve got the outline,” Bo says. “I just need a writer, director and a little time.”
By now, he’s learned that things tend to show up when they’re supposed to.
“I just believe I was supposed to be here,” he says. “The marriage started and ended that quickly, but this is where I’m supposed to be… I received so much love from people in this community. I’m a part of it now.”
He sits with that thought for a moment.
“I’m living my best life right now. The best years of my life, I’m living them today.”
For more information about Bo and KMRL apparel, click here.
Editor’s Note: This story was updated as of May 19, 2026 to remove language from its original version.