Maryville teacher recounts survival challenge

Maryville teacher recounts survival challenge 

The Daily Times 

By: Mathaus Schwarzen 

May 13, 2026 

 

Scotty Hicks spent his spring break in the woods. 

The Maryville Junior High teacher could have spent the time relaxing. Instead, he flew to North Carolina, where he left everything but the clothes on his back behind and joined 99 other people competing for a chance to win $250,000. 

He described the ordeal — days and nights with no food or shelter — as a spiritual experience. 

 

“There was nothing easy about it,” he said. “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life.” 

Now home and recovered from his ordeal — he lost 20 pounds in the wilderness, dining on worms and grubs to make it through — he’s reflecting on the experience and finding, suddenly, that he’s very grateful for the world he lives in. 

Into the woods 

Hicks — a fitness-oriented wellness teacher with more than 25 years of teaching experience — has always been up for a good challenge. He’s run marathons, mountain biked, snowboarded and considers himself the outdoorsy type. 

He’s a veteran who saw combat overseas, but he describes teaching as a “real challenge.” His classroom is decorated with memes about military equipment and even spent shells from the Bradley Fighting Vehicle he worked on in the Army. 

And yes, he’ll let the kids borrow them for props. 

“There’s never a dull moment,” he said. 

Hicks was watching television when he happened across the Amazon Prime show “Beast Games,” a reality competition hosted by Jimmy Donaldson, better known as “MrBeast.” The YouTube star has amassed almost 500 million followers with videos that often pit teams against each other in outlandish competitions, such as seeing who can live the longest in a grocery store or who will be the last to leave a circle drawn on the ground. 

Donaldson’s videos advertise cash prizes well over $100,000. 

Hicks thought that sounded pretty fun. He looked up the requirements and recorded a video audition answering one of the questions provided by the casting crew. (In case of a zombie apocalypse, Hicks’ plan is now to create a “brain cologne” to distract the undead.) 

The casting crew eventually reached out. Hicks deleted the email. 

“I was like, these scammers are not getting my Social Security number,” he said. 

They were insistent. Hicks went through the casting process and eventually found himself on a plane to Raleigh, North Carolina, on Feb. 28, having been told only to pack for “a long, cold weekend.” 

It wasn’t until he’d been blindfolded, put on a bus and shipped into the middle of nowhere that he realized what he’d agreed to. 

Toughing it out 

Donaldson titled his video on the experience “I Stranded 100 People in the Wilderness for $250,000.” Hicks, as he found out, was part of a team of people pitched to the cameras as “survival experts,” competing with average individuals for a chance to split the cash prize. 

To even the playing field, the other team, wearing red, got a shopping spree to prepare. Hicks’ team, in blue, received one hatchet to share. 

The video, he said, made the experience look easier than it really was. 

“The hardest thing immediately was the hunger,” Hicks recalled. 

Both teams received a small amount of rice and beans to ration, but the food stores they had were quickly depleted. On the blue team, Hicks said, they ate whatever they could find to make it through. 

He does not recommend snake soup, by the way. 

He found the cash prize a little disappointing, to be honest, especially when compared with the money he was losing through his unpaid leave at work. But he was determined to push through. 

He wanted to make his home proud, he said. 

“I just wanted to come back with my integrity. I wanted to come back as an inspiration, if I could, to my students, to my own family, and that’s what I wanted to do,” he said. “But man, it was hard.” 

He remembers nights spent huddled by the fire, waiting for the sun to bring enough warmth that the group could sleep. He remembers eating about 400 calories a day of foraged food that a fellow contestant taught him to find. 

Most of the other contestants were younger than him, he recalled. The blue team began looking to him to solve disputes — a skill he thought he’d left behind in the classroom. 

Toward the end, he remembers wandering through the woods wearing one combat boot and a slide, looking for food and reflecting on his life. 

“I’m just praying and I’m talking everywhere I go, talking to myself,” he said. “I really reflected on life, my military service and just a lot of things I’m trying to deal with.” 

Homeward bound 

The pack thinned quickly, but the competition didn’t seem to have an end in sight. Hicks found himself staring down a deadline at the end of spring break, knowing he had to go home, write a lesson plan, pay his bills and come back to work. 

It wasn’t easy to say goodbye. Hicks was one of the final people to leave — just days before the competition ended — but he knew he had to stand by his obligations. He left on Sunday, paid his bills from the hotel, took Monday as a sick day and was back in class Tuesday. 

The blue team won, by the way. They had fewer than a dozen people left. 

Back in class, Hicks found himself bound by a nondisclosure agreement and unable to tell his students where he’d been. That didn’t stop them from guessing, he said. Now that the episode has finally aired, Hicks said his students view him as a “little celebrity.” 

He thinks it’s funny. He’s also unsure why Donaldson referred to him by his first name, Randy, throughout the entire video. 

Being back in Maryville, he said, has given him a new appreciation for the modern world. His mattress feels heavenly at night, and when he turns on the faucet, he receives running water on demand — a modern miracle. 

Even though he didn’t win the competition, he’s grateful for the support of his school district. 

“My school system is great. The fact that they allowed me to do this and supported me is incredible,” Hicks said. “And now that I’m back and the video is out, I have received so much support from the students, from the community and from my friends and family.” 

He’s grateful for the opportunity to recuperate, too. 

But would he do it again? 

“I don’t know that I would, because it was so hard physically and mentally, and the prize itself wasn’t life-changing,” he said. “But they’ve already asked me if I’d be interested in future competitions, and I said yeah, just give me a call, and we’ll see.”