Staff photo by Steve Muscatello New Ulm's Madison Roufs plays the ball during the first half of the Eagles' game against Fairmont Monday at New Ulm High School. For more photos of this event go to cu.nujournal.com

NEW ULM — One game after the New Ulm girls’ soccer team scored a season-high nine goals last Thursday, New Ulm struggled to find the back of the net on Monday.

Fairmont swept the regular season series with New Ulm, defeating the Eagles 2-0 on Monday at New Ulm High School. The Eagles lost to the Cardinals earlier in the season 2-1 at Fairmont in the second game of the season.

Isabelle Lenort scored both Fairmont goals as the Cardinals improved to 7-4 overall and 5-2 in the Big South Conference. The Eagles slipped to 1-6-2 overall and 1-4 in the conference.

While the final score didn’t show much activity for New Ulm, the team did have several scoring chances that came up just short.

“I think they were paying a little more attention to the ball and anticipating the opponent’s moves a little better in the second half,” New Ulm coach Jonathan Johnson said. “We still need to work on some of our passing, however our passing was better than it has been. We weren’t getting a lot of pace on our shots, we had a number of shots and some of them were pretty solid but more of them were not.”

New Ulm had a chance 8 minutes into the first half, but it was unable to get a quality shot off after a pass from the left side was mishandled in front of the net.

Twenty minutes later, Paige Kalis stole the ball at midfield, outraced the Cardinal defender and fired a shot inside the penalty box, but her shot was denied by the Fairmont goalkeeper.

“We’ve been having some difficulty with that throughout the season where we get a real nice breakaway and we’ll take a shot and miss the goal by a foot,” Johnson said. “At least they’re not sailing over like they used to, we had some that were real close to the post and the Fairmont keeper pushed one out with her fingers, otherwise that one was going in.”

While the Eagles were unable to capitalize on their chances, the Cardinals fully took advantage of theirs. About 3 minutes later, Lenort got a rebound and booted it past New Ulm keeper Caleigh Heck to give her team a 1-0 lead with 9:36 left in the first half.

Less than 5 minutes later, Lenort again scored, this time on a free kick. That lead carried into halftime and the rest of the way.

The Eagles had a few more chances in the second half, but it was more of the same. Elle Cooper’s kick sailed wide left on a breakaway 12 minutes into the second half. One minute later, the Eagles were denied again in front of the net. Another breakaway with 19 minutes left sailed wide left for the Eagles.

New Ulm has a busy week ahead. It is at Mankato Loyola on Tuesday and hosts Waseca on Thursday. It finishes the week with a home game against Glencoe-Silver Lake on Saturday.