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Thursday night’s rivalry game between San Antonio Churchill and San Antonio Clark will go down in Gucci Bowl lore. Clark junior running back Xavier Canavis scored a 3-yard touchdown with 12 seconds remaining to lift the Cougars to a 28-21 District 27-6A win over the Chargers in front of 3,403 fans at Farris Stadium. The touchdown capped an improbable comeback that saw Clark (5-0, 2-0) score 28 unanswered points after trailing by three touchdowns at halftime.

San Antonio Clark (TX) rallies to stun San Antonio Churchill (TX), 28-21, in Gucci Bowl Classic originally appeared on The Sporting News

SAN ANTONIO — Thursday night’s rivalry game between San Antonio Churchill and San Antonio Clark will go down in Gucci Bowl lore.

Clark junior running back Xavier Canavis scored a 3-yard touchdown with 12 seconds remaining to lift the Cougars to a 28-21 District 27-6A win over the Chargers in front of 3,403 fans at Farris Stadium.

“It felt like heaven,” Canavis said of scoring the game-winning touchdown. “It felt like relief. There were times when I let my team down, but I stuck with it and scored.”

The touchdown capped an improbable comeback that saw Clark (5-0, 2-0) score 28 unanswered points after trailing by three touchdowns at halftime. The Cougars have won three of the last five Gucci Bowls, cutting Churchill’s overall advantage to 25-18-2.

“We just went in and looked at the things we were messing up on,” Clark head coach J.L. Geist said. “We focused on one rep at a time. Let’s fix it. Let’s execute. Let’s play harder. Let’s do the things we know we’re supposed to do and play that way. That’s kind of what we did.”

Churchill (1-4, 0-2) dominated the first two quarters behind a huge performance by junior running back Kalobe Rond, who scored all three of his team’s touchdowns om runs of 45, 5 and 23 yards and finished with 156 yards on the ground.

The momentum finally swung Clark’s way when Jackson Shannon returned a punt for a 79-yard touchdown to help cut the lead to 21-7 with 6:00 left in the third quarter.

“That was huge,” Geist said. “It sparked them. We were ready to get it down to eight seconds, call a timeout and hit the field goal [late in the fourth quarter]. We designed a play to go to the hash our kicker liked, then Xavier popped it. That was good enough.”

The Cougars reached the end zone again on their ensuing possession when quarterback Isaiah Santillan found a wide-open Elisha Johnson for a 10-yard touchdown to help trim the lead to 21-14 with 21 seconds left in the third.

The Chargers appeared to reclaim the lead when Rond broke free for a 70-yard touchdown run on their next possession, but it was called back and led to a punt instead. Clark then knotted the game up on a 29-yard touchdown run by Canavis, who finished the game with 142 rushing yards.

The Chargers jumped out to a 21-0 lead in the 2024 Gucci Bowl before going on to win the contest, 39-19.

“We were not going to let that happen again,” said Canavis, who was named the game’s Most Valuable Player. “The punt return got us up and happy about it. After the punt return, we said, ‘This is our chance to win.’”

So, why the Gucci Bowl moniker? When the rivalry originated in 1984, both Clark and Churchill had heavy preppie populations among the student bodies. Think the high school from The Breakfast Club battling the high school from Sixteen Candles on the gridiron.

In series history, the teams tied twice (1988, 1990) and met three times in the postseason (1987, 1993, 1994) with Churchill winning the first two and Clark the last one. The Chargers won 11 straight games in the rivalry between 2010 and 2020.