Washington’s fast-moving offense was on the attack and soon the ball was flying toward the Highland goal.

Again.

Highland junior goalkeeper Ayden Havel jumped up and grabbed it. No worries. He held the ball for a few seconds, then boomed a kick downfield.

The Demons took 37 shots in their season-opening boys soccer game March 28, and 23 of them were on goal. Havel is the reason a 5-0 Highland loss wasn’t 8-0 or, like last year, 10-0, or like two years ago, an embarrassing 14-0.

Funny thing. A year ago, Havel was a forward. Fastest on the team. He has become Highland’s best wide receiver in football. He’s a starter in basketball. But when a mid-season injury to Jackson Keller last year left the Huskies without a goalkeeper, Havel stepped in.

It’s just part of the transformation of a soccer program that has more than doubled in participation numbers over the last three years and is now playing JV games for the first time in years.

The Huskies scored the first goal of the game in their season-opener against Mid-Prairie on March 26. Just one week after that, the Huskies drilled Wapello 11-1 in a game ended early by the state’s 10-goal mercy rule. It was the most lopsided win for Highland in 10 years and puts the Huskies on a path to chase after a brighter future for a program that hasn’t had a winning season since 2015.

“These kids are owning that,” said head coach Dylan Stewart. “They understand, ‘We could leave an impact on this school, we could look back and say, hey, remember those four years that we really committed to soccer? Now look where the program’s at.’

“There’s a belief and a buzz, I would say, around soccer right now from the staff, the administration, down to students,” Stewart said. “Junior high kids are talking about it. High school kids are talking about it.”

And it really goes back to that one day last year when the Huskies didn’t have a goalie. When Havel was summoned that day to a meeting with Stewart, he knew exactly why.

“He knew even before I was going to talk to him,” Stewart recalled. “He came up to me and he was like, ‘I know what we’re going to talk about.’”

“I was like, ‘Really?’” Stewart said.

“Yeah.”

“I’ll be a goalie. I have no problem with it.”

That moment still brings a smile to Stewart’s face. It not only solved last year’s problem but it determined this year’s starting goalkeeper and maybe next year, as well. But it was more than that.

“It’s that kind of selflessness quality that he possesses,” Stewart said of Havel. “He’s very much a team-first kid. You’ll see it in the weight room, on the football field. He is all about that team concept and really buys into that. I think he’s a big part of the culture change that we’re seeing at Highland. Kids getting into the weight room, kids holding each other accountable. It’s stuff that we haven’t had at Highland for a while. That junior class. And he’s a big part of that.”

Havel, who had 115 saves last year and 16 in the season-opening game against Mid-Prairie, has been effective with a strong vertical leap that all football receivers have.

“It wasn’t very difficult to make the change,” Havel said. “I think it was almost easier switching to goalie just because I think my reaction time is faster than my speed, actually.”

“It’s fun,” he said. “I wouldn’t change anything.”

The teaching began immediately.

“One of the first games in goal, he came to talk to me,” Stewart said. “Do I need to run up and play it (the ball) right away? Or can I take my time? He was starting to understand, he controls the tempo.”

And now he’s in charge with the ball.

“You’re quarterback in this game,” Stewart said he told Havel. “So if you think we’ve got to slow down, we slow down. If you see an opening, we attack that opening.

Around Havel, the practices are different at Highland now. With more than 30 players, practices are split up now. While varsity players worked on corner kicks Friday, JV players worked on different drills on a different field. Stewart has had athletes in other sports talk to him about soccer.

“They’re hearing their classmates talk about how much fun they’re having,” Stewart said. “So we’ve got a real good culture going on. But it all comes back to that buy-in from that junior class.”

Havel is one of those juniors who was on the team as a freshman. He remembers the one-win season ending with three consecutive 10-0 losses.

“Coming in freshman year, it was bad. We’re getting 10-0d,” said Havel, who scored a team-high three goals that season.

This year, Havel is one of 13 juniors, a class that includes co-captain Angel Avendano (senior Stella Slaymaker is the other team captain).

Without a junior high soccer program, practices, and games, turn into soccer classrooms, especially for the 11 freshmen on this year’s team. One afternoon, they ended practice by talking about a Premier League game that would be on NBC Peacock the next morning at 6:30. Another classroom.

“We have so much soccer knowledge that we have to make up for, I’ve kind of put it on the kids,” Stewart said. “Hey, we need to seek outside the two hours we have at practice. We can only do so much in that two-hour window, and what we do, we try to keep it to the basics.”

It’s Soccer 101.

News columnist Paul Bowker can be reached at bowkerpaul1@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter: @bowkerpaul