The moment Seymour High School senior Kinsley Folsom crossed the finish line at the semistate meet at Brown County in late October, she knew she didn’t want her cross-country career to be over.

With her high school season over, Folsom knew what she had to do.

“I knew the minute I crossed the line at semistate that I couldn’t not go to college,” she said. “I had to go to college and run because I didn’t want that to be it.”

Last Friday in the Seymour High School cafeteria, Folsom was joined by her family, friends, teammates and coaches to officially sign her national letter of intent to run at Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College.

“It feels really good to know that it’s not over for me,” Folsom said.

Folsom has been running ever since fifth grade, and she said she still feels like she has a lot to accomplish with her running career. She still wants to break 19 minutes for a 5K, which she intends to do at the next level.

Seymour graduate Lara Skaggs runs track and field at Saint Mary-of-the-Woods, so she mentioned Folsom’s name to SMWC head coach Zach Whitkanack.

Whitkanack came to watch Folsom this season during one of her races at Eagle Park, and he brought a couple of the SMWC runners, as well.

Folsom scheduled a visit and was sold on wanting to attend the school.

“I love the campus, I love the people, so I buckled down and said I’m going to Saint Mary-of-the-Woods,” Folsom said.

In addition to running, the Seymour senior is excited about studying psychology. When SMWC runners came to watch Folsom run, one of them was a psych major, and when Folsom went on her official visit, she met with a professor to talk about her options with that major.

“I figured out I wanted to do psychology,” she said. “We talked about different ways I can take psychology into my career. He talked about how I could do stuff in the prisons and do stuff with crim (criminology), and that just caught my eye.”

Saint Mary-of-the-Woods allows students to double major with psychology and criminology, and that’s what Folsom plans to do.

When Folsom was a freshman at Seymour, she thought she wanted to be a veterinarian. But in one of the college readiness courses offered at Seymour, Folsom took a personality test, and all of her traits matched up with psych.

Originally, she wasn’t sold, and she went back and forth with law, veterinary and psych until she officially decided on psych this year.

“It’s relieving,” she said. “It feels like I just have a ton of bricks lifted off my shoulders. I don’t have to think about that anymore. I know where I’m going, and I know what I’m doing.”

During Friday’s signing, it was a heartfelt moment for Folsom and everyone in attendance who watched her sign the dotted line.

When she officially put pen to paper, she elected to have her teammates up there with her. Folsom has cherished being part of the Seymour cross-country team for the past four years.

“I really had a family here,” she said. “I know that any time I need to talk to them or they need to talk to me, we’re always here for each other. It’s something that I really appreciate about this team. This team really bonds, and we all just kind of implement that in the new runners, and it just carries on every year. I’m really going to miss my family.”

But Folsom will get one more season this spring with most of her teammates during track and field season.

Folsom plans to run the 3,200 and the 3,200-meter relay. She has high aspirations in the two mile to end her Seymour career on a positive note before heading to SMWC in the summer.

“I’m really going to train in the two mile and get my times up to try to make state,” she said.