‘It feels phenomenal.’ Sayre captures its first district football title.

Sayre hadn’t played a close game all year, so, of course, Friday’s home game against Eminence to clinch the school’s first district championship would go down to the wire.

The Class A No. 5 Spartans also hadn’t trailed all year, but they found themselves down 8-6 through three quarters against the Warriors.

Charlie Slabaugh’s 21-yard touchdown run broke the Spartans offense out of its slump and put Sayre up 12-8 with 8:54 to play.

Sayre’s defense forced Eminence to punt on its next possession, and the Warriors never got the ball back.

“That’s the hardest game we’ve played all year,” said Slabaugh, who also had an 11-yard TD catch from Luke Pennington in the first half. “They play hard-nosed football. We looked at the stat sheet and they were a pass team and we were like, ‘Oh, they’re going to spread it out and throw it a ton. I think we spread out a little too much and they were killing us with that run. They were tough and gritty.”

The win clinched the Class A, District 5 championship, a first for the school that restarted its football program under former NFL quarterback Chad Pennington six years ago.

“It feels phenomenal,” Coach Pennington said. “We talk to the kids about, no matter who you’re playing, when a district championship is on the line, it’s going to be harder than what you think.”

The Spartans welcomed Friday’s nail-biter after winning their first eight games by an average margin of 36-7.

“That’s just huge for our team,” Slabaugh said. “And I think it’s going to be good for us going into playoffs.“

Sayre racked up stats that would otherwise indicate an easy victory. Luke Pennington threw for 292 yards and a touchdown on top of 88 yards rushing. Slabaugh had 144 yards receiving and 48 yards rushing.

And Luke Pennington led the game-clinching drive to run out the clock.

Facing a fourth-and-1 with just under two minutes to go, Pennington took the snap, angled around the center of the defense and gained 4 yards for a first down. With Eminence out of timeouts, Sayre only had to take a knee seal the win.

“Luke did a really good job of seeing that they were lined up in the A gaps and the B gaps and so he kind of shot the C gap to get it, which was very smart play on his part,” said Coach Pennington, Luke’s father.

Coming into Friday, Eminence (5-4) averaged more than 42 points a game and Sayre (9-0) had routed all but one opponent by multiple touchdowns. But each team stumbled offensively against each other with the Spartans squandering four trips inside the 20-yard line, three of them in the first half.

After scoring on its opening drive, Sayre fumbled on its next possession at the 11, then drove inside the 5 only to have a penalty push the offense so far back it ended up turning it over on downs.

Sayre’s Caden Jones intercepted a second-quarter Blaze Berry pass in the end zone to help frustrate Eminence, too.

“Our defense has been stout all year,” Coach Pennington said. “That’s a strength of ours that people don’t realize.”

But Eminence soon put together its best drive of the game, capped by Landon Smither’s 1-yard touchdown run around left end. Warriors quarterback Blaze Berry found Austin Bright in the corner of the end zone for the two-point conversion and an 8-6 lead with 1:01 left until halftime.

Sayre responded with a promising drive that quickly moved the Spartans back inside Eminence’s 20-yard line, but it could not get the clock stopped in time to set up a scoring play before the halftime horn.

On Sayre’s first possession of the second half, it drove deep into Eminence territory again only to have a 17-yard field goal attempt blocked after a low snap botched the play.

“We did everything imaginable to keep ourselves out of the end zone,” Pennington said. “But you know, that’s how you learn and you keep fighting and that’s where your brotherhood comes in. You’ve got to lean in on each other and not get frustrated with each other and keep moving forward and that’s what they did.”

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