And while Tuesday’s Big South Conference game against Waseca was called early, the Eagles didn’t need more than a few minutes to put the Bluejays away anyway as they scored all nine of their goals in the first half to earn a 9-0 win at New Ulm High School.

Levi Johnson scored four goals to lead New Ulm.

The game was called with 4:19 left to play due to a lightning sighting.

With looming storm clouds and the varsity game being moved up to a 5 p.m. start, the Eagles were looking to get rolling right away and never let off the gas in the first half.

Staff photo by Travis Rosenau New Ulm’s Brady Thomas battles Waseca’s Jayden Lenz (17) for the ball as the rain falls during the second half of Tuesday’s Big South Conference boys soccer game at New Ulm High School.

Jackson Ocampo, who finished the game with two goals and three assists, put the Eagles on the board first in the second minute on an assist from Logan Goblirsch.

“We wanted to come out strong because even at half they can call it and if we end it 0-0, they’ll just call it a tie,” Ocampo said. “So we decided at the beginning of the game we wanted to come out strong, as always we do, but we wanted to come out extra strong just in case this happened.”

Goblirsch assisted on the next goal minutes later when Methodius Amoah scored in the fifth minute to put New Ulm up 2-0.

Daniel Brownfield scored on an assist from John Hoffmann in the 11th minute before Goblirsch added a goal of his own 19 seconds later on an assist by Amoah.

Then Johnson got all four of his goals in a row to put the Eagles up 8-0. His first goal came in the 15th minute on an assist by Ocampo, while his next was assisted on by Jace Lohman in the 31st minute. Johnson’s third goal came when Ocampo got a breakaway and was able to dish it over to his right in close for Johnson to put in the back of the net in the 37th minute.

Johnson’s fourth goal came on an assist by Amoah less than a minute later on a shot that hit off the Waseca goalie’s hand and banged off the post and into the net.

Ocampo scored the final goal on an assist by Amoah in the 39th minute.

The second half saw the Eagles sub in many of their non-starters, who weren’t able to add to the lead but limited Waseca’s scoring opportunities despite a steady rain that started and continued throughout much of the second half.

“I told them, ‘I want to play good soccer, I want to work on our possession, work on our passing, if the shot is available, we’ve got to work on our longer shots,’ so we’ve worked on that, too,” Eagles head coach Tim Plocher said.

The Eagles, who dropped their first game of the season last year to Southwest Minnesota Christian before winning six in a row, are off to a strong start again this year. For Ocampo, one of 11 seniors on the team, knowing this is his last season has been motivation for the strong start.

“I think really our motivation is … most of us that are playing, it’s our last season,” Ocampo said. “We’ve known that we’ve had the ability to go far in the past due to us playing together as we were younger and we really just grew up playing together. We kind of just figured since it’s our last season, we have to just out everything and anything into our work and our craft to be able to continue.”

The Eagles are at Tri-City United for a 7 p.m. conference game on Thursday.