The St. Thomas More Cavaliers elicit a wide range of emotions amongst sports fans in western South Dakota.

A Catholic parochial school that has been in existence for less than two decades, its success in recent years on fields, tracks and courts around the state has brought out pride and prejudice, best wishes or boos, from its fans and its critics.

With the school's football team heading to Vermillion for its fourth straight try at winning a state football championship today at 1:30 p.m., we send best wishes for good luck to the Cavaliers against their opponents, the perennial Class 11A powerhouse West Central.

The Journal encourages our readers to support all of its West River high school programs and athletes when they reach the state finals in their respective sports, and so we also send out our best wishes to the Colome and Gregory football teams, which are competing in the 9B and 9AA championships on Friday in the Dakota Dome.

The Cavaliers have had just one football coach in the 17-year history of their program. Coach Wayne Sullivan, and his wife, Lori, have been instrumental in the building of not just a successful football program at STM, but an entire school community as well.

Sullivan has been a positive influence as a coach, teacher and principal on all the students who have passed through the Catholic school system during his years there. That's reason enough for the larger community of Rapid City to rally around the Cavaliers as they attempt to win the school's first-ever state football championship today.

He's built STM football from its beginnings, when cleats were held together with duct tape and wins were few and far between. Anyone that watched as a young coach fresh out of Mount Marty College took the reins at a non-existent program, on a non-existent field, and molded it into one of the best football programs in western South Dakota knows that the coach, his family and his players are winners who deserve our best wishes.

So, a heartfelt 'good luck' to Coach Sullivan and the Cavaliers.

Beat West Central.