NEW ULM — New Ulm Eagles boys’ hockey coach Ryan Neumann said that despite being 0-2 early in the season he is not worried about his team’s ability to be a force in Section 3A and may point more towards the caliber of opponents to start the season.

“Our first game with Southwest Christian (a 6-2 loss) we added the day before we were supposed to play, so I can’t say that we were ready and we went into that game as kind of a learning curve,” Neumann said. “We had a bad 12 minutes of that game but after that it was a 2-2 game. And the game with Litchfield (a 2-1 loss) was a good game as they are one of the favorites in the section with us and Hutchinson. The shots in that game were 27-27. We are 0-2 but did we want to start out 0-2? No, but the toughest part of our schedule this year were our first two games.”

Southwest Christian is 3-0 and has posted wins over AA schools Chanhassen and Holy Angels. The Lichfield is 2-0-1.

“In our first game we tightened up our new system with our forecheck and defensive zone systems,” Neumann said. “We got guys used to playing with each other, we do have players back but we have new lines and we are trying to get that chemistry with the lines. It was much better against Litchfield than it was in our first game.”

On the top line, Neumann has Braxten Hoffmann at center with Blake Soukup and Jace Addy, the second line has Noah Wilmes centering a line of Keagan Schiro and A J. Arneson with Kedar Schmitz centering the third line of Luke Geiger and Kyden Wenisch.

Neumann said that his team has the advantage with the depth of three lines. “We can play three lines and most teams in southern Minnesota will run two lines pretty heavily and will rely on their top line to do all of their scoring for them,” Neumann said. “We have three lines who are all capable of scoring — our third line has the speed and runs the forecheck really well. We are not scared to match them up against another team’s top line.”

New Ulm opens Big South Conference play at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday night when they host Marshall at the New Ulm Civic Center.

“We need to get that first win to take the monkey off of our back and get rolling,” Neumann said. “Just kind of looking at our schedule coming up, I think that we are going to score quite a few goals in our upcoming games. We only have three goals in our first two games but I think that in our next 15 games our confidence is going to go up and we are going to score some goals.”