NATCHEZ — The Cathedral Green Wave football team learned a good bit and made a few corrections following last week’s jamboree games that will help them as they host Bowling Green of Franklinton, Louisiana, at 7 in tonight’s season opener, Coach Chuck Darbonne said.

“We’ve improved in the passing game from last year,” Darbonne said of last week’s one-quarter jamboree games against Ridgeland High School that ended in an 8-8 tie and against Copiah Academy, who won 20-13. “We’ve gotten better in the passing game, and we’ve shown a little leadership from this year’s senior class so far. All in all I was impressed with how we played in both quarters against both teams.”

Football season kicks off for most Mississippi teams tonight and Darbonne said he and his team have been studying film from last week’s Bowling Green game against a bigger team from Georgia.

“They are one of the teams to beat in the new classification for 4A,” Darbonne said of Bowling Green. “They have very good, skilled players. They can run. They are very well coached. You can see it on film. They actually played a real game last Saturday against a really good team in Georgia and lost 30 to 14. While we played a jamboree, they played a real game. It is going to be a tough one on Friday. It’s a tough one to start the season with, but it is going to be a good thing for us playing against that kind of competition early on. It is going to show our kids where we need to be.”

Cathedral is now a member of District 4 in a new classification — Class 4A under the Mississippi Association of Independent Schools.

On Thursday afternoon, the Green Wave worked on special teams, formations and ran a few plays in preparation for tonight’s game.

“We have a solid defensive line led by Bryson Moore and Jalen Moore who are brothers, they are also juniors that have started for us — Bryson has started for us, this will be his third year, and he was an All-MAIS election last year as a sophomore so that’s an honor to be the only sophomore on the All-MAIS 3A team,” Darbonne said. “We are expecting some big things. We have to replace some guys that started last year in the secondary but so far we’ve had some really good performances practice wise and in the jamboree last week we came out and we found a couple of more guys that we could depend on.”

Darbonne said Cathedral has a solid offense as well.

“Offensively, we are going to be led by our offensive line, who I think is possibly the best offensive line in the new classification, the 4A classification,” Darbonne said. “Our quarterback, JT Taylor, this is his third year to start,” Darbonne said. “We have good wide outs. We have a good running game, guys that have played with experience on that side of the ball, too. Mainly, JT and our three offensive senior linemen, Chris Johnson, Ethan Huff and Jack Russ are going to lead us offensively and we expect big things from them. We expect them to be big leaders for us. So they go, so we go.”