Yes, it's wonderful that my high school is good at sports

I went to a private high school. My brother went to a private high school as well, though his was a new one built just down the road from where we grew up. The education was top notch, and I wouldn't change it for anything in the world. One of the most enjoyable parts of my high school experience was attending state tournaments, which were won twice by our hockey teams and our soccer teams. That's a state championship for every year I was in high school. Not bad.
In the mean time, the hockey team has since been a perennial contender in the state tournament, even being forced to move up in the class since they owned the the smaller schools. My brothers' school, being new, was not so lucky.
Kyle graduated in '04. Since that time, the team has won a state basketball tournament and is in their first state football tournament. Looking at the public school districts that my school and his would typically draw from, only one has proved to be a perennial favorite in any sport, Eden Prairie in football, and they are coached by the son of Bud Grant.
You might think that this is leading into a debate about recruiting in high school, but that's not it. Not at all. In high school, kids are there for three reasons, education, social interaction and athletics (religion gets thrown in their at some schools, of course), in that order. If you have the means to get to a school with a better reputation for any of those three things, then why not?
The problem, at least in Minnesota, is with the classification of teams in their various divisions. Schools like mine, for example, graduate 200 students or so a year, and as such, were placed in the same class as schools of similar size. The same can be said for my brother's smaller school, playing in it's smaller class.
Larger schools are assumed to be better because they have a larger talent pool and access to better facilities than their smaller counterparts. This simply isn't the case for a private school. Just think, a school like, say New London-Spicer, drawing from a couple towns of a little over 1000 people is in the same class as my brothers' a town in the Minneapolis metro, drawing from several towns of greater than 10000 people. And anyone who is the best at their sport, expecting their athletic prowess to lead to a college scholarship, could convince mommy and daddy to fork over the cash for high school.
With those kinds of numbers, it's no wonder we went to schools with such athletic success. The way to level the playing field is to make private schools play in higher classes.