They Did It! Walker Hayes and Family Complete a Full Year of Trick Shots: 'Adventure of a Lifetime' (Exclusive)

• Walker Hayes and his family have completed their year of trick shot challenges
• The country star, his wife Laney and their six children fully realized what they were getting themselves into within a month of starting the challenge — but they persevered
• Hayes says he was blown away by how the tasks melted away egos and turned the family into a selflessly supportive unit

Shooting a trick a day for a whole year? Looking back on his decision to do it, Walker Hayes says at the time all he could think was “hey, this is going to be fun.”

Today, Hayes just laughs at his complete ignorance. He laughs at the idea that he thought this crazy idea would still be fun. And he laughs at the sheer absurdity of his family doing this.

And yet — drum roll please — that’s exactly what they did, and it might be their biggest trick of all: 366 days (because it’s a leap year, so of course they had to be real) of bouncing ping pong balls, throwing water bottles, throwing footballs, rolling duct tape, lifting basketballs, knocking down dominoes, throwing cards, shooting volleyballs, shooting Nerf guns, filling Solo cups, hitting golf balls — and doing anything else you can imagine to complete the seemingly incredible trick shot and shared their victory on Hayes’ social media.

“It was like an amazing movie,” Hayes, 44, tells PEOPLE as he reflects on the year, “but I wouldn’t describe it as fun.”

Laney, Lela, and Walker Hayes. Instagram of Walker Hayes

Admittedly, that’s how it started. He and his three sons, Chapel, 16, Baylor, 14, and Beckett, 12, are avid fans of the trick-shot art that is a mainstay on social media, and last year decided to create their own. The formula is simple: brave people rely on copious amounts of luck and skill to pull off an incredible feat, usually with common household items or sports equipment. Viewers are, of course, spared hours of failed attempts. Instead, they can enjoy the sweet wonder of success, along with the wild celebration of the trick artist.

Hayes and his sons were able to pull off a few tricks, and he posted a series of short videos on consecutive days. He admits he was happy to find a new way to feed his millions of fans on social media.

“I just thought, hey, it’s easy to publish,” he recalls. “Everybody loves it. The guys were excited. It was kind of early summer, and the weather was really nice. So yeah, it just made sense. Let’s do the whole year.”

Baylor and Walker Hayes. Walker Hayes Instagram Walker Hayes’ daughters Loxley and Everly joined their dad for a sweet coming-of-age song: ‘Slow It Down’

Because togetherness is what makes a family, Hayes’ wife Laney and three daughters — Lela, 18, Loxley, 10, and Avery, 8 — were quickly roped into the project, and Hayes went public with his intention.

But within a month, he says, everyone fully realized what they were getting themselves into – the relentless tedium of trying, the frustration and disappointment of failures that sometimes lasted for hours, the corrosive need for creativity to come up with a new trick every day (because were determined never to repeat any).

We were in shock, Hayes recalls. “We were like, oh my God, we’ve only been working for a month and we’ve got 11 of these left.”

This wasn’t fun anymore. “It was”, he says, “dark”.

So why not give up? Never an option, Hayes says — not for a family led by a man who bounced around Nashville for nearly two decades before becoming an “overnight” country star, at age 41, with the blockbuster hit “Fancy Like.” (That feat, Hayes allows, is probably his ultimate trick.)

Walker and Loxley Hayes. Instagram of Walker Hayes

Determined to persevere, all eight family members hunkered down, inventing new tricks of varying difficulty and complexity, which they then performed everywhere they went: at their lake house south of Nashville and at a construction site near their new home, on a tour bus. they all share, backstage at the arenas where Hayes performed, in store aisles, hotel rooms, mall restaurants, public parks, gyms, restaurants, airports, swimming pools, school gyms, even on their mission trip earlier this year to Rwanda.

And as the tricks piled up, something started to happen, Hayes says, that made the “unfun” worth every moment. Crushing was turning into a training ground for life.

“I really think colleges or high schools should have trick-shot classes,” he says. “It taught my family—and Laney would agree—more than any course we’ve ever taken.”

Think about it: every day they set a new goal. Excitement grew at the beginning, but then, of course, their first attempts failed. Thirty minutes, an hour, two hours later, they were still trying. Sometimes they came close. Spirits were constantly shifting between hope and discouragement. And then finally, happily, their reward arrived. Temporarily, of course, because, after all, tomorrow is a new day.

“It’s a metaphor for everything beautiful and meaningful to me in life,” says Hayes. “Everything that’s amazing—like marriage, having kids, chasing a dream, my relationship with the Lord—none of it just comes in eternal bliss. Most of it is a lot of struggle.”

Hayes says he was blown away by how the tasks melted away egos and turned the family into a selflessly supportive unit.

“At first you’re like, oh, I want to get a chance,” he says. “I want to be the one to win the cup. But in an hour, you’re like, I’m literally going to celebrate if anybody gets it, and I’m going to say I was on the team and take credit for it. You’re just rooting for the team.”

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He also felt a sense of pride as he watched his children step up and take on their roles.

“It was amazing to watch my boys,” he says. “By the time we got to probably 250, I just noticed they started taking control. I kind of disappeared, mostly, unless I was working with them. They just looked at it like, ‘Hey, this is what we do every day.’ Some days I’d come home after a long day and Laney would say, ‘Oh, we got a trick in the park.'”

Fortunately, some tricks turned out to be much easier than expected. Hayes recalls one set-up: His 14-year-old son, Baylor, threw a football at an archery target while Hayes shot an arrow at it, trying to knock it into the target. “We made it on the 10th try,” he says, and he even hit the bat.

Baylor was also an integral part of what Hayes considers their most difficult trick, which was elegantly simple: turning two marker pens, one in each hand, to rest simultaneously on end on the counter. “I put in probably five hours and he put in eight,” says Hayes. It was Baylor who scored.

The family also experienced many low points in their year-long venture. Hayes estimates they had to give up about 20 tricks without success. “Those moments would come, unfortunately, only because of time constraints,” he says.

Family members also had to gather a lot of grace in the face of calamities. “We’ve definitely had some nightmare days where we’ve been trying and trying and trying for hours, and then when we get it, we notice the camera’s out of battery or the person taking the picture didn’t get it right,” Hayes says. – Tears came to our eyes.

His personal rock bottom came late one night, out on the road with his daughter Lela, when he realized that no trick had been announced that day.

“I was ready to quit,” he says. “We’ve been so busy. I honestly wondered why I committed myself to this?”

Just as he was urging Lelo to get out of bed and help him come up with an idea, Laney sent him a video of 10-year-old Loxley.

“She set up her own trick,” he says. “She taped some things to the ceiling and threw a ping pong ball up there and it went down a little slide and into the cup. And she did. She saved the family that night. She kept the streak alive. It got us all through hard times night, and honestly, it inspired me.

On a recent weekday afternoon in suburban Nashville, 16-year-old Chapel was the family hero after nearly four frustrating hours of a particularly boring ping-pong ball trick. The family took over the practice area at the high school, inviting two of their idols, professional trick-shot artists and brothers David and Daniel Hulett, to join them for a day of multiple trick-shots.

Hayes and his three sons took turns with the Huletts, who traveled from their home in Great Falls, Virginia, as they tried to get three ping-pong balls into three mini-Solo cups. The cups were arranged on the table, each a little further away. Getting the first cup was relatively easy – seven or eight tries at most. Then they went after the other. If they missed, they had to go back to the first cup. Every three or four minutes they could fill both the first and second cups. But the third glass proved impossible, and each failure caused loud sighs.

“This is the one!” Hayes encouraged with a frequent and futile chorus.

About two hours later, they switched strategies, first trying to win the farthest cup. It looked like there was more potential for success, but an hour later, all they had achieved was a series of near misses.

A break was called and the group turned to another trick involving balloons, balls and darts. But while Hayes, son Baylor and David Hulett were trying it, Chapel and Beckett Hayes went back to ping-ponging with Daniel Hulett. Less than an hour later, there was a loud roar as Chapel sunk the third ping-pong ball and everyone rushed back to the table to shout, jump, chest-bump and bear-throat – a moment of euphoria worthy of a winning lottery ticket.

By now, it’s a familiar experience for the Hayes family. It’s not just joy, says Hayes. That’s a relief. “There’s no need to ever do that again,” he says.

Afterwards, Chapel accepted his congratulations with a shrug and a hint of a smile. “It was luck,” he said.

Hayes thinks it was more than that. Over the course of a year, he watched his oldest son, who is also his shyest child, come out of his shell with tricks. “I don’t think he would just sign up to save the day and hit the last shot,” Hayes says. “He’s not that kid. But he’s done it many, many times. I get emotional talking about it.”

It was also not lost on Hayes that his two boys took their own initiative and continued to try the trick. “It’s not something I taught them,” he says. “That’s something trick shots taught us. They wanted to finish what we started. Again, not me or Laney are great parents. That’s what your kids are going to say, ‘We have to do trick shots 366 days!’ ”

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For that fateful final trick, anyone else could have devised an elaborate trick-shot-to-end-all-trick-shots, ending the year with an eye-popping spectacle. Instead, the Hayes family simply goes out in signature style: together. Along with the Hulett brothers, the eight of them lined up at the table and tried to knock over half-filled water bottles and land them upright. It obviously wasn’t their first bottle-throwing rodeo. They completed the trick shot in less than two minutes.

“I wanted to do something simple,” says Hayes. “And I wanted everyone in the family to be involved.”

Hayes says this isn’t the end of the family’s tricks, but the streak is definitely coming to an end and it’s time to enjoy the achievement.

“Honestly, it was as amazing as anything else in life,” he says. “It wasn’t heaven. It wasn’t bliss. It was very hard. It was a struggle. But it was the adventure of a lifetime.”

Hayes, along with his family, embarks this week on his 29-date Same Drunk Tour, which runs through September 1.

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Source: HIS Education