When Kristi Follmar was 13 years old, her father died. In order to deal with the pain and the hurt she worked out, ran and began punching on a heavy bag.
"I dealt with being upset with everything is that I would just get mad, and run really hard, or do something," Follmar said. "So my mom bought me a heavy bag to hang up in the garage, so I can go beat it up when I got upset. That just turned out to be a workout for me and I started working out on it all the time.
"My friends would come over and we would all punch on it and stuff."
Follmar is a senior Telecommunications major at Ball State and has been boxing since her sophomore year, and became professional this past February. During her freshman year, she was involved in cross country and track.
She did not continue sports her sophomore year but felt a need to be part of something physically challenging.
Follmar read an article on Krista Hoffman and wanted to get involved in boxing.
"I couldn't stand not being in a sport, so I wanted to try something new, totally different than what I have done."
After a few call around Ball State, Follmar found out about the Police Athletic League and gave them a call. The PAL club said it was free and invited her in. And since then Follmar has been training there.
Before Follmar began training at the PAL club, she was put in a position at a party one night, her sophomore year. A girl did not like her at the party, and people encouraged the two to fight.
The people pushed the coffee tables to the sides and gave the two boxing gloves.
Follmar said to the people, "What do you mean, I'm supposed to punch her?
"I ended up beating her up really bad. A week later, I started calling looking for a gym."
Though Follmar is a boxer, she is not a violent person.
"I'm totally not a violent person," Follmar said. "f anyone ever starts anything with me I always talk my way out of it. I don't like to fight. Especially now, being a boxer, I don't want people to be like 'Oh, she's a boxer, she's tough, I want to start something with her.' I just want to come across as a nice person."
Follmar comes into to train at the PAL club 5-7 days a week. She runs everyday and works with a coach, a couple of amateur fighters and another professional.
"Our coach runs us as a team, rotates us on the bags, doing hand pads and sparing," Follmar said. "It's a really good training regimen."
Two fights into Follmar's professional career, she got to fight a world ranked boxer in Mia St. John. They received the phone call four days before the actual fight and Follmar had only been training for the past two weeks.
"I realized from the first round, I thought I had the advantage," Follmar said. "She didn't hit as hard as I thought she could. I thought I beat her."
The fight went all four rounds and at the end they judges announced St. John as the winner of the fight. Yet, the crowd disagreed Follmar said.
"The entire crowd backed me up," Follmar said. "They booed her out of the venue and after the fight I just had swarms of people coming up to me saying 'You won that fight, you got robbed,' and it made me feel much better."
Follmar knew that if she did not go into the fight and knockout St. John, that she would lose the fight. Because of her inexperience in the professional world, she knew the judges would not favor her.
The lose to St. John has affected Follmar as a boxer.
"I've been training a lot harder now," Follmar said. "I don't want that to happen again. I think because of that fight, we're going to be getting phone calls from better known fighters, kind of at her level, and I want to be ready for it.
"I think if I was in better shape for that fight, I could have won it. I felt like I was kind of holding myself back because I didn't want to get tired."
By the time the fourth round came along, Follmar said she didn't feel so tired.
"I shouldn't have held back as much as I did. So I've been training really hard since then."
Follmar has been getting a lot of support from friends, family and people that just recognize her or have heard of her as "the boxer."
"I'm really surprised at the fact of how many people are so supportive of this," Follmar said. "It's not my main objective in life to be a boxer, I put school first and sometimes it's hard and frustrating when working out cuts into work time, sometimes I get the feeling that I don't want to do it anymore. But then I think about how disappointed my friends and family would be because they're so excited about it. It gives me a lot more motivation and keeps my head strong."
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