As an update I am seeing a very slow start to getting the domain to rank in the top 200 results for its own name (riley). By this time with a .com I would usually have seen my site somewhere in the top 100 without much effort. Although, I haven't started a new domain from scratch for a competitive key work like "riley" in a while. I will continue to build links and eventually do more marketing when the site if further along.
Let me know if anyone else has had some of the same experiences with gccTLD rankings.
Thanks!