By Karen Gleason
The 830 Times
Candidates for the upcoming Val Verde Sheriff’s Office Academy on Monday completed the physical fitness portion of their qualification process.
Eleven men and women who are seeking careers in law enforcement muscled their way through the agility course, set up in the city’s Moore Park along the San Felipe Creek.
The candidates began the course at the barbecue pits adjacent to the South Bedell Avenue Bridge over the creek by jumping over a metal gate, then running on the walkway along and over the creek, continuing upstream to the railroad bridge. Under the bridge, each of the candidates had to punch a padded square for 20 seconds before re-crossing the creek and making his or her way up and over an eight-foot wall.
The final leg of the course included jogging over the suspension bridge in the park, dragging a 150-pound sand-filled dummy for 20 yards and trotting up a steep stone staircase.
Val Verde County Sheriff Joe Frank Martinez, VVSO Chief Deputy Waylon Bullard and VVSO Sgt. Jimmy Sunderland Jr., who is the training coordinator for the sheriff’s office academy, watched the candidates run the course.
“This is part of the process of selecting the best applicants, people who are suitable, in our opinion, for this line of work, for being a deputy in the Val Verde Sheriff’s Office,” Martinez.
“This is part of the selection process, and for some of these young people, it is one of the first steps in the start of their law enforcement careers,” the sheriff added.
Sunderland marked each candidate’s time for the course on a clipboard he carried. He said the course is necessary because of the often physical nature of police work, especially in an officer’s early years on the street.
“This is a physical fitness qualifier. We need to make sure that anybody who wants to attend the academy can meet a minimum level of fitness so that we know that they will be able to do the job, that they can keep up with the physical training, the defensive tactics training, and that requires a person to be in good physical shape,” Sunderland said.
He noted there would be physical fitness training throughout the course of the academy for those candidates who are admitted.
The academy begins in mid-November and will last about five months.
—
Contact the author at delriomagnoliafan@gmail.com
