VETERANS SPOTLIGHT
Breaking Barriers As the first United States’ woman to train at the Royal Military Police Training Centre, Shellie Crandall was determined to make it count
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or years, basketball was all Shellie Crandall knew, or even cared about. At Jefferson High School in Jefferson, Ohio, Crandall was the first woman to score 1,000 points and the school’s first four-year varsity letter-winner, leaving school as the leader in career points per game, games played, field goals, free throws, free-throw percentage, assists and steals. Following high school, she took her impressive résumé to Lakeland Community College not necessarily because she loved school, but rather because she loved basketball. And then in one fleeting moment, it was all taken away. Midway through her freshman year, as she went for a loose ball, Crandall’s left knee went in the other direction of the rest of her body, tearing her Anterior Cruciate Ligament (ACL), effectively ending her career. “The only reason I was in school was to play basketball,” says Crandall. “I really didn’t want to go to college. My parents wanted me to go and I could play basketball, so that’s why I went. Once I couldn’t play basketball, I didn’t go.” Out of college and away from basketball, Crandall bounced around odd jobs, eventually landing on the crew of a demolition company, manning the cherry picker moving steel beams from one spot to another. The same hand-eye coordination that propelled her to success on the hard court allowed Crandall to succeed as the crane operator, drawing the attention of her co-workers. “At the end of shifts, people would put a coke can on the crane and see how far I could swing it until the can fell off,” Crandall says. “They would bet money (on how far she could go).” “One time there were 50 people watching and I said, ‘what am I doing? I cannot do this the rest of my life, are you kidding?’ So the next day I walked down to the Army recruitment office and three days later I was at boot camp in Alabama.” For someone who came from small-town America, the teamwork and reliability the Army offered was something she had never experienced before. “I had never been exposed to a lot of diverse people or thoughts,” Crandall says. “I didn’t realize how others could help me, and I didn’t realize how I could add value to people. I realized that you couldn’t get through this by yourself.” Following boot camp, Crandall was deployed to Germany to serve with the Military Police. One day while walking around the camp, she saw an ad asking for volunteers to become body guards. Responding to the opportunity, Crandall found herself as the only woman interviewing for the position, but that didn’t prevent her from getting the job and joining a fellow member of the U.S. Army as the first two Americans to attend the Royal Military Police Training Centre in England. “It was intense,” says Crandall. “The U.S. Military provides a lot of safety. In England, it was more realistic.Training was ten times harder. We put a small explosive in a car, went 100 feet away behind a berm and blew it up. The shrapnel was raining down, cutting your arms, but the lesson
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was, don’t miss a little piece of something because you could die.” “That never would’ve happened in the U.S. You’d have a helmet on and everything, but they wanted you to understand the impact if you missed something like that.” The training was exhaustive, meant to push everyone to their furthest limits, potentially weeding out individuals along the way. But not Crandall. Day after day she pushed herself on, determined to finish.Then, just one week from graduation, much like in college, a knee injury threatened to sideline it all. Part of the training was to carry half of a telephone pole, running miles at a time with three people carrying the pole and others rotating in. Needless to say, it was difficult, another opportunity to test each person’s will to continue.Then during one of the final rounds of training, Crandall felt a sharp pain in her right knee. But she knew the stakes, so she pressed on. Later that day, her group was running drills in the city when they stopped for tea. Finally, Crandall had a chance to sit down, but as she tried to pull her pant leg up over her knee, she couldn’t get it above the joint because of how swollen it had become. Eventually she said something to her commander, and at the hospital she found out not only had she tore a Shellie Crandall at work at G4S headquarters in Jupiter, Fl. ligament but she also had a blood clot, requiring emergency surgery. After the surgery, her provost came to offer his apologies, wishing her a speedy recovery. The next day however, was a different story. “He came in and said, ‘if you aren’t out of here by three o’clock we’re sending you home.’ So I got the other American to come and get me, literally carry me out of the hospital.” Crandall completed the final week of training, graduated and was put on an assignment to protect multiple generals, including the Commander of the U.S. in Europe, allowing the girl from small-town America to see the world. Now, with G4S, Crandall serves as Senior Vice President of Product Development for CASH360, but finds her military experience is never far from mind. “The attention and respect, everyone [at G4S] is so proud of veterans, it made me say I want to join this company. It made me proud. ”
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G4S Military Outreach Initiatives, Awards, Recognition & Statistics Most Valuable Employer (MVE) for Military by CivilianJobs.com - 2014
26%
12,822
Number of veterans hired by G4S since August 2011 in conjunction with the White House’s “Joining Forces” campaign
Estimated number of G4S employees in the U.S. are military veterans
Military Employer of the Year Transition Assistance Online
23%
Percent of our security officers have military experience
4,900
Number of veterans hired between April 2015 and April 2016
VetJobs Outstanding Military Employer - 2014