Riddle me this: I am 5,000 strong, have 129 championships, which makes me number one, and I bleed blue and yellow. Who am I?

If you guessed Carmel High School you are correct! The wealthy neighborhood to the north has won the most championships of any high school in Indiana. And just to step on second place North Central (61 state championships), Carmel even has a section of their website devoted to showing off their many state championship teams.

The change I’m proposing would help wipe that smug look off their website.

When SHS got too large, Perry Township split the school up and created Perry Meridian. Combined the schools now would have a student body size of 4,400 students. That’s 700 less than Carmel has under one building. The best way to deal with the overpopulation and over-competitive nature of Carmel is to split the school.

The competitive nature at Carmel and the amount of students vying for varsity spots make it nearly impossible to compete at a high levels against other schools. For example, a cross country team has seven varsity runners. In 2015, Carmel had 120 kids vying for those seven spots. That means only 5.8 percent of the team got to run varsity.

Yes, building a new school would cost a pretty large sum of money. Supposing that it costs 300 dollars per square foot to build a high school that would meet the city of Carmel’s standards, they would end up paying between 140 million and 160 million to build the high school. Even though it is expensive, I’m sure that the taxpayers of Carmel can afford it. In Perry Township a 50 million dollar referendum passed just last year. If Carmel could pass that three years in a row then they would have their new school.

With a new school, each school would have about 2,500 students enrolled. That would mean that an athlete would have twice the chance to make a varsity sports team. Instead of having a 5.8 percent chance to be varsity cross country would have have an 11.6 percent chance to be varsity.

This would also work out for other after school activities as there would be more of an opportunity to act in a play, or be a group leader. At SHS I’ve never been in an after school activity with more than 30 kids. The organizer knows me and I’m able to develop a relationship with most people in the club or sport.

The combination may even have some other unforeseen benefits. The athletes would have a rivalry game with the other schools every year to prepare for. I always look forward to beating up on Perry every year so it would have the same effect on Carmel and their new sister school.

Hey, you might even get a cool combined stadium named after one school.  Oh wait, that’s getting fixed!