Kinsley Ramey made history on Jan. 10. She broke a 12-year-old school record in the 100-yard breaststroke by less than a second. Two weeks later, she broke the record again.
Ramey is an eighth grader at South Oldham Middle School. She started swimming at South Oldham High School in seventh grade, the first season she was allowed to swim at the high school level. Ramey was introduced to swimming by her dad, Sean Ramey.
“I started off doing Taekwondo when I was four, and I’m a third-degree black belt, but then, my dad mentioned how he used to swim,” Kinsley said. “It just kind of brought up an idea, because I was trying different sports to see if I could do multiple, and I just ended up choosing swim.”
Kinsley started swimming when she was seven and did Taekwondo and swim full time until she was 12-years-old. She has also won nationals in taekwondo. Sean believes swimming and Taekwondo are life skills, and these sports can teach anyone about life.
“My whole thing with her is that as a youth and as long as you’re living in our house, you will do sports and be active,” Sean said. “You will compete in something, doesn’t matter what it is. I’ve always told her that. You just have to take something seriously. You have to compete with it, because I think there’s a lot for kids to learn through winning and losing.”
Kinsley feels like her experience with taekwondo at a young age has helped her develop into a better swimmer.
“It obviously made me have a lot of fast twitch muscles because of the kicking and the punching,” Kinsley said. “I feel like that helps with starts and fast turns and the competitiveness. It helps me with my nerves a lot too, because sometimes you can get really nervous, but definitely, taekwondo helped me with that.”
Taekwondo has proven to be very beneficial to Kinsley in the water. She has qualified for the KHSAA State Swimming and Diving Championships in both seventh and eighth grade. Kinsley swam in the championship heat in 2024, placing fifth in the 100-yard breaststroke.
Going into her seventh grade year at South Oldham, Kinsley was worried about building relationships with her teammates with the age difference.
“It was pretty nerve-racking, because I was just nervous about how I was going to make friends on the team, because I’m so young and these other people are in high school,” Kinsley said. “Towards the end, I made so many good friends, and it’s just a great time. This year, I’ve made more friends on the team that I didn’t really talk to in the beginning, but now, I talk a lot too. I’m just more confident on the team, and it makes me feel welcome.”
The welcoming feeling that has allowed Kinsley to gel with her teammates is due to the culture South Oldham head coach Scott Cooksey has built.
“I feel like culture probably plays a big hand in it, because if we weren’t so much like a family for that team, people wouldn’t be as confident to swim,” Kinsley said. “I feel like being a part of the culture just makes everyone want to be there more and just cheer each other on, which obviously makes you go faster if you have like a student section.”
Cooksey has seen a growing maturity in Kinsley. He’s seen kids get burnt out of swimming at 15 and 16 years old, but he sees that continuous drive in her to achieve excellence in the pool.
“You see her on the side of the pool asking a lot of questions,” Cooksey said. “You see her coming to practice ready to work. She’s having fun at the same time. She’s learning how to balance both of that, which I think is really important, especially as she continues to get older and grows in the sport.”
Cooksey believes the sky’s the limit for her.
“Typically, you see the younger girls starting to take those constellation heat spots or maybe they’re breaking into that final heat, but to be in seventh grade and taking a constellation spot and being an eighth grade taking a final heat spot, the trajectory is upward and upward,” Cooksey said. “She’s going to keep pushing herself to be number one. She’s going to keep pushing herself around with the competition.”
Cooksey was in similar shoes as Kinsley. He was the first eighth grader to swim at the varsity level when he attended South Oldham but also won a state championship while in high school. It’s important to Cooksey that Kinsley keeps swimming for herself and wants to succeed, because she wants to succeed.
“I look at the overarching swimming world of not just Kentucky, but the states in general, it’s a growing sport,” Cooksey said. “We have more and more kids every year joining our team. More and more kids are joining the teams across the city, which echoes my request that more pools get built around the city or inside Oldham County, because we can’t grow more Kinsleys. We can’t grow more state champions in more rural areas, or we don’t have the opportunity to do so, because we’re running out of space to be able to do it.”
Cooksey still swims competitively in the masters program at Lakeside Swim Club. Kinsley swims for them as well during, before and after the high school season. Cooksey has seen her be at the pool at 5:30 a.m.
“I was walking into masters practice [three weeks ago], and her dad was parked next to me,” Cooksey said. “I walked in, and there she was at 5:30 in the morning, getting ready to jump in the pool for a morning practice. Those are just things that we just don’t have the bandwidth to do, so by having those competitive teams around, it gives the upper advantage.”
Kinsley goes straight from school to Lakseside practice. She is usually an hour and 15 minutes late, because South Oldham lets out after practice has started. Kinsley practices Monday through Saturday.
“It’s hard. I’m not going to say that it’s easy, but it’s hard,” Kinsley said. “I do Lakeside swimming, so the training is definitely up top. It’s just a good exercise, definitely will wear you out, especially drylands. For drylans at Lakeside, we start at 5 a.m., and we go to 6:30 a.m. before school, so it’s definitely a workout.”
Kinsley’s Lakeside coach Nathan Smith gives Kinsley and other swimmers who show up late an extra lane for when Smith has to coach a different group. He’s been impressed with Kinsley’s ability to embrace a self-directed role at a young age.
“Kinsley is always really good about doing what she’s supposed to be doing without you standing over her,” Smith said. “She’s pretty independent. Personality wise, she’s really fun. She likes to have fun at practice. She likes to work hard, and she knows how to work hard while having fun. I think immediately she bonded with the other girls in our training group and our other girls around her age. She’s pretty popular on the team right now.”
Kinsley joined Lakeside in January of 2024. Smith has seen a lot of improvement in Kinsley’s abilities in just a short amount of time. Her chosen swims are the 100-yard breaststroke and 50-yard freestyle, but he’s pushed her to expand her swims.
At the club championships in March 2024, Kinsley swam in eight different events. She finished the 200-yard individual medley in the top eight. She also cut a few seconds off her 100-yard butterfly and backstroke.
“I kind of explained to her that we have some goals for her just beyond the state of Kentucky too,” Smith said. “That’s the focus of our team is to try and be national and realizing that she can be good at a really big variety of things. That helps if you ever get stuck in your more specialty events. You have other avenues given too. Other ways that if you’re patient and you keep on working through everything, that helps keep a steady progression as you go along in your swimming career.”
Cooksey also wants her to test new events and see how she does and if she likes them.
“As a coach, I have to kind of push them to say, ‘hey, maybe let’s try this once or twice and see how it feels…,” Cooksey said. “If there’s other ways that we can look at it and say, ‘Hey, you might finish fifth in the 100 breaststroke, but if you swim this race, maybe you would finish in the top three based on times. You can always look at that and game plan it together.”
Smith wants to see Kinsley develop a variety of swims that she can use as secondary swims and swims that complement her 100-yard breaststroke well. He wants to see Kinsley develop to her full potential by the time she hits her senior year.
“I’d just like her to be in the spot where it’s like, ‘okay, I have four other events other than the 100 breaststroke that I could choose from and be successful in at the high school level. That would just be pretty cool for her. With the club swimming, they can swim a lot more events over the course of a competition. It’s having that variety just gives you more opportunities to be successful.”
Cooksey wants to see Kinsley step into a leadership role on the team and not just be another puzzle piece. He sees a lot of potential in her and wants her to realize that potential.
“I would love to see her starting to take root in that and being the champion, not just of herself but of her peers,” Cooksey said. “I think that she spent the last two years trying to figure out her place on the team and now that she’s cemented it for sure, I think that over the next couple of years, spending time and helping teammates develop and leading her peers is what we really are hoping for with the next couple of years with us.”
Sean has coached Taekwondo for a successful 26 years. He really enjoys being on the other side and being the parent. Sean really enjoys watching his daughter compete and be successful at what she does. It’s a family affair for the Rameys when Kinsley is in the pool.
“I love being a parent of an athlete,” Sean said. “I’m just a big advocate of sports. There’s so much to learn from it. I feel like a lot of the generation today doesn’t get a chance to see what defeat is like and also what victory is like. I think sports really teach a lot of great things.”
Kinsley worked her way to breaking a record as old as she is. She hopes to continue to grow upon that record.
“It makes me feel very accomplished,” Kinsley said. “Since I have four more years, I just want to keep breaking the record and breaking it, so it gets harder to beat every time.”