Richmond Hill football fans will get their first look at the 2023 Wildcats Friday when the team holds an intrasquad scrimmage game at 5:30 p.m. at Wildcats Stadium to mark the end of spring practice.

Fans are advised to pick up a roster as they enter the stadium as there will be a lot of new faces on offense where Coach Matt LeZotte is facing the task of having to replace 84 percent of last year’s offense.

The Wildcats are coming off a disappointing 3-7 season after moving up to Class 7A. They were 0-4 in Region 1-7A play as they missed the state playoffs for the first time in seven years.

Richmond Hill’s biggest holes to fill are at quarterback, running back and wide receiver where they lost Ty Goldrick who signed to play at Erskine, Zion Gillard who is headed to Peru University in Nebraska and wide receiver Ravon Grant who signed with West Georgia after breaking nearly all of the school’s receiving records.

The most experienced returnee of the quarterbacks is Kirk Scott who completed one of four passes for 24 yards while playing in seven games. The top returning rusher from last year is Caleb Easterling who had 205 yards and Nick Bliss had 18 catches for 223 yards.

Easterling is a starting cornerback who picked up his yardage playing quarterback in the Wildcat formation.

Having to fill so many holes among the skill positions forced LeZotte to take a different approach to preparing for this upcoming season. He’ll find out Friday night how effective the off-season work has been.

“The whole focus on the off season starting in December and January has been strong with fundamentals, building the thing up instead of building on what we’ve done,” LeZotte said. “We’re taking these guys back to the grass roots and building a fundamentally sound team.

“We’ll get back to the drawing board this summer and fix some stuff up and be ready to go this fall. We’ve got guys we can win with on Friday night.”