HOPKINSVILLE, Ky. — Christian County High School’s Rylee Owens has a simple philosophy of life: go all out. She said, “I strive to be the best that I can be... I always want to win.” Thus far, she has.
The senior from Hopkinsville has a 4.2 GPA with a special focus on math and business. Her math teacher April Harris told Spectrum News 1, “This is my 26th year teaching, and she’s definitely in the top 1%, if not higher than that. She is just one of a kind. She not only wants to learn the subject, but she wants to understand it as well.”
Rylee is student council treasurer, treasurer of Future Business Leaders of America and treasurer of the National Honor Society. She’s also president of the Spanish Club.
Harris says Rylee is a natural leader. “She’s definitely inclusive. She is friends with any and everybody. She’s very kind, compassionate. She’s a problem solver.”
That skill extends outside the classroom, where she’s been the starting libero on the CCHS varsity volleyball team since 8th grade. She’s been named All-Region the last three years, won the ‘Your Sports Edge’ Fan Favorite Award the last two years and was the Kentucky New Era Player of the Year in 2021.
“I just love it. I love that it’s never the same thing. It’s never the same team. I run the defense and it always gives me something to be better. My passes are not perfect every time. So it never gets old,” said Rylee.
She’s also coaching a local under-13 volleyball team and hopes to play in college.
But when she’s not on the court, she’s on the track—with a love for auto racing. Her family owns multiple dirt track cars and they travel together most weekends to different races, where Rylee works on the pit crew.
She said, “I love helping change the tires, and it’s different for every place you go, like the setups for the car. So I like learning the math about why is it like that for this track? And why is it different for this track and (how does) the distance and the length make a difference on the car? I just like learning a lot. It’s a good family thing for us. You know, we all enjoy it. My parents, my grandparents, we all love it.”
She also gives back to her hometown; volunteering with multiple charities in Hopkinsville. She explained, “The community. They’ve helped us so much, with school and extracurriculars, they pour in a lot to us as students. So I think it’s good to give back to them. You know, make sure that they know that what they do is appreciated and know that we, as students, appreciate them.”
Her future is wide open. She could be an engineer, a dentist, or even come back and run her family’s construction business. But whatever she chooses, expect it to be in Christian County. She’s determined to make a difference in the community where she’s lived her whole life—in a house her father built.
She knows her generation can be maligned for being selfish, but she is proving that stereotype wrong.
She said, “I’m hopeful people will come to their senses and just know that there is more to the world and just don’t make it a miserable place to be. That’s part of me wanting to go get an education and come back and make (Hopkinsville) better. You know, if everybody wanted to go make the world a better place, it would be a better place.”
Words of wisdom from a deserving high school scholar.