Rotation symmetric Boolean functions have been extensively studied in the recent years because of their applications in cryptography. In this study, a novel method to construct p-variable 1-resilient rotation symmetric functions over GF(p) is proposed based on a Latin square with maximum cycle structure, which is not required to solve any equation system. And a lower bound on the number of p-variable 1-resilient rotation symmetric functions is given. At last, an equivalent characterization of p-variable 1-resilient rotation symmetric functions over GF(p) is demonstrated, as a direct corollary, the number of p-variable 1-resilient rotation symmetric functions is represented by all the solutions of the equation system. (C) 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.