Spartans’ home streak, shot at Section 4 title, dashed by Pioneers

By Mike Drago Last updated Oct 27, 2024

Lampeter-Strasburg's Emory Fluhr wraps up Wyomissing's Justice Hardy Saturday at Wolfrum Field. (Purdon Photography/Brad Drey)

2024 Berks football coverage presented by

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By Mike Drago — MikeDragoSports.com Managing Editor

Chase Eisenhower was a fifth-grader, dreaming of wearing a Wyomissing football uniform, the last time the Spartans lost a home game.

The junior linebacker hopes it’s a long time before it happens again.

“It hurts, having won every game here for years,” he said Saturday after the Spartans saw their hopes of a Lancaster-Lebanon League Section 4 title dashed by a rock-solid Lampeter-Strasburg club, which beat them 20-7 at Wolfrum Field.

The Pioneers (7-0, 10-0) snapped Wyomissing’s 36-game home winning streak, which dates to 2018, with their swarming defense and the play-making abilities of quarterback Caileb Howse, who always seemed to be a step ahead of the Spartans’ defense.

The Spartans (6-1, 8-2) flushed him out of the pocket time and time again, forcing him to throw away passes or scramble to keep plays alive – and he did.

He rushed for 111 yards and scored on a 15-yard run to essentially put the game away with 7:21 left.

The Spartans had no such play-makers. Senior Emory Fluhr and the Pioneers’ outstanding linebacking crew made sure of that. They quickly closed up inside lanes and shut down outside avenues, keeping Wyomissing boxed in and scoreless over the final three quarters.

“On a lot of the plays the point of attack was blocked (by us) for a second, then closed real, real fast,” said Wyomissing coach Bob Wolfrum. “Their middle linebacker (Fluhr), we couldn’t get to him. Among others, he just killed us.”

The Spartans managed just four first downs and 62 total yards in the first half; it didn’t get much better in the second half.

They were forced to punt on seven of their 10 possessions overall, turned it over once and took a knee to end the first half on another. They finished with negative passing yardage and just 146 total yards, half Lampeter’s figure.

Spartans’ Max Tipton has Caileb Howse in his sights. (Purdon Photography/Brad Drey)

Their only score came late in the first quarter after Danny Fleischood got a hand on a punt, giving his team the ball at the Lampeter-Strasburg 15. Derek Macrina scored three plays later to tie it 7-7, but that was it for Wyomissing’s offense.

“They were just physically (strong),” Wolfrum said. “We couldn’t block ’em. We had nothing we could call our own. We were lucky to get a first down.”

The Spartans defense, led by Eisenhower, who had more than a dozen tackles, was outstanding, too. Three times it stopped the explosive Pioneers in the red zone to force field goal attempts.

The first of those, on Lampeter’s first possession, went awry when Wyomissing was charged with a running into the kicker penalty. That gave the Pioneers a first down at the 1, where Dominic Brown converted on his second try for a 7-0 lead.

“That’s huge,” Lampeter coach Victor Ridenour said. “ Any time you get a fresh set of downs inside the 5, that matters quite a bit.”

“That definitely was a downer,” Wolfrum said of seeing Lampeter turn three points into seven. “We had a nice stop there. You do dumb stuff like that and you pay for it.”

The Spartans forced another short field goal attempt in the final seconds of the first half and went into intermission trailing just 10-7. They were right in the game, but never figured a way to consistently move the ball.

Justice Hardy, the Spartans’ most dangerous weapon, twice left the game after getting shaken up, the first time in the first half when he took a big hit on his left thigh, then again in the second half when he hobbled off with a right ankle injury.

He returned both times but was never able to break a big play. He finished with 49 yards on 12 carries and didn’t have a reception. The Pioneers were always in position on the edge to prevent him from breaking free.

“(We were) trying to set a hard edge to get him to stop his feet and cut so we could have flow come inside out on that,” Ridenour said. “That’s huge if you can do that. (Our linebackers) can run really well and they tackle really well. They do a good job.”

Other than a 44-yard run by Howse, which set up a 42-yard field goal by Peter Fiorello to extend Lampeter’s lead to 13-7 late in the third quarter, the Pioneers didn’t have many big offensive plays, either.

They simply played power football and let Brown grind it out; he had 30 carries for 128 yards and helped Lampeter pile up a huge time-of-possession advantage.

The win clinched the top seed in the District 3 Class 4A Tournament for the Pioneers and gave them the first 10-0 regular season in program history.

Wyomissing will have to settle for the No. 2 seed in Class 4A, which will get them a first-round bye and quarterfinal home game.

To earn a sixth straight District 3 championship the Spartans know they’ll have to figure out a way to beat Lampeter-Strasburg.

“I told em: ‘Now we know what it feels like to get our ass kicked,’ ” Wolfrum said. “That happens to everybody at one point. You’ve gotta get up and work and get better, because we might be playing them again down the road and we certainly don’t want that kind of outcome again.”

“We’re gonna see ’em again, hopefully,” Eisenhower said, “and when we do we’ll be ready for them.”

Spartans’ Francisco Fabian wraps up Dominick Brown. (Purdon Photography/Brad Drey)

	1	2	3	4	Final
Lampeter-Strasburg	7	3	3	7	20
Wyomissing	7	0	0	0	7

Scoring summary

1	Lampeter-Strasburg	Brown, 1 run (Fiorello kick)	4:43
1	Wyomissing	Macrina, 3 run (Maher kick)	0:54
2	Lampeter-Strasburg	Fiorello, 21 FG	0:17
3	Lampeter-Strasburg	Fiorello, 42 FG	2:59
4	Lampeter-Strasburg	Howse, 15 run (Fiorello kick)	7:21

Team statistics

	Lampeter-Strasburg	Wyomissing
First downs	19	11
Rushes-yards	45-238	40-148
Passing yards	57	(-2)
Total yards	295	146
Passes	8-15-0	2-8-1
Fumbles-lost	0-0	2-0
Punts-average	5-31.2	7-33.1
Penalties-yards	7-50	2-5