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 shots challenge
• The country star, his wife Laney and their six kids all fully realized what they’d gotten themselves into within a month of starting the challenge — but they perserved
• Hayes says he has delighted in how the tasks have melted away egos and turned the family into a selflessly supportive unit

Doing a trick shot a day for an entire year? Looking back on his decision to go for it, Walker Hayes says, all he could think at the time was “hey, this is gonna be fun.”

Today, Hayes just laughs at his utter cluelessness. He laughs at the idea that he thought this crazy idea would just keep being fun. And he laughs at the sheer absurdity of his family doing it.

And yet — drum roll, please — that’s exactly what they have done, and perhaps it is their greatest trick shot of all: 366 days (because it’s leap year, so of course they had to keep it real) of bouncing ping-pong balls, flipping water bottles, throwing footballs, rolling duct tape, heaving basketballs, toppling dominos, tossing cards, kicking volleyballs, shooting Nerf guns, filling Solo cups, whacking golf balls — and doing anything else they could conjure up to complete a seemingly improbable trick shot and share 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."

Granted, it did start out that way. He and his three sons, Chapel, 16, Baylor, 14, and Beckett, 12, are all avid fans of the trick-shot artistry that’s a mainstay on social media, and last year, they decided to try coming up with their own. The formula is simple: Brave souls rely on bountiful amounts of luck and skill to pull off a jaw-dropping feat, usually with common household items or sports equipment. Viewers are spared the hours of failed attempts, of course. Instead, they get to savor the sweet miracle of success, along with the trick-shot artists’ wild celebration.

Hayes and his sons were able to accomplish a few trick shots, and he posted a short string of videos on consecutive days. He admits he was happy to find a new way to feed his millions of fans on his socials.

"I just thought, hey, it’s easy to post," he recalls. "Everybody likes it. The boys were excited. It was kind of early summer, and the weather was really nice. So yeah, it just made sense. Let’s do an entire year."

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

But within a month, he says, they all fully realized what they’d gotten themselves into — the relentless tedium of the attempts, the frustration and disappointment of failure that sometimes went on for hours, the gnawing need for creativity to come up with a new trick daily (because they were determined never to repeat one).

"We were in shock," Hayes recalls. "We were like, oh my gosh, we’ve only done a month, and we have 11 more of these left."

This was no longer fun. "It was," he says, "a grind."

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

Determined to persist, all eight family members hunkered down, devising new tricks of varying difficulty and complexity, which they then pulled off everywhere they went: at their lake house south of Nashville and the construction site nearby of their new home, on the tour bus they all share, backstage in the arenas where Hayes was performing, in store aisles, hotel rooms, mall food courts, public parks, workout facilities, restaurants, airports, swimming pools, school gymnasiums, even on their mission trip earlier this year to Rwanda.

And as the trick shots accumulated, something started to happen, says Hayes, that made "not fun" worth every single moment. The grind was turning into a training ground for life.

"I truly feel like colleges or high schools should do a trick-shot class," he says. "It taught my family — and Laney would agree — more than any class we’ve ever taken."

Consider it: Every day, they set a new goal. Excitement built at the start, but then naturally, their first attempts failed. Thirty minutes, an hour, two hours later, they were still trying. Sometimes they came close. Spirits shifted constantly between hope and discouragement. And then, finally, blessedly, their reward arrived. Temporarily, of course, because, after all, tomorrow was another day.

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

Hayes says he has delighted in how the tasks have melted away egos and turned the family into a selflessly supportive unit.

"At first you’re like, oh, I want to get the shot," he says. "I want to be the one that hits the cup. But an hour in, you’re like, I will literally celebrate if anyone gets it, and I will say that I was on the team and take credit for that. You’re just rooting for the team."

He also has felt pride as he’s watched his children step up and take ownership of their roles.

"It’s been amazing watching my boys," he says. "By the time we got to probably 250, I just noticed they started to take charge. I kind of vanished, for the most part, unless I was doing one with them. They just looked at it like, 'Hey, this is what we do every day. Let’s get it.' Some days I’d come home from a long day, and Laney would say, ‘Oh, we got a trick shot at the park.'"

Thankfully, some trick shots have turned out far easier than anticipated. 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, attempting to pin it to the target. "We got that on like the 10th try," he says, and he even hit the bullseye.

Baylor also was integral in what Hayes considers their toughest trick, which was elegantly simple: flipping two highlighter pens, one in each hand, to simultaneously stand on end on a counter. "I invested probably five hours, and he invested eight," says Hayes. Baylor was the one who got the shot.

The family also experienced many low points in their year-long undertaking. Hayes estimates they had to give up on about 20 trick shots without success. "Those moments would come, sadly, just because of time constraints," he says.

Family members also had to muster considerable grace in the face of mishaps. "We definitely had some nightmare days where we tried and tried and tried for hours, and then when we got it, we noticed the camera ran out of batteries or the person filming didn’t film it right," Hayes recounts. "We’ve had tears."

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

"I was ready to quit," he says. "We were so busy. I was honestly asking myself, why did I commit to this?"

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

"She had set up her own trick shot," he says. "She had taped some things to the ceiling and threw a ping-pong ball up, and it went down a little slide and into a cup. And she did it. She saved the family that night. She kept the streak alive. It got us all through a really tough night, and we stayed committed. Honestly, it inspired me. You know, I was going, OK, my little girl’s on board. Am I gonna give up?"

On a recent weekday afternoon in suburban Nashville, 16-year-old Chapel was the family hero after almost four frustrating hours of a particularly pesky ping-pong-ball trick shot. The family had taken over a high school practice facility, inviting two of their idols, professional trick-shot artists and brothers David and Daniel Hulett, to join them in 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 bounce three ping-pong balls into three mini-Solo cups. The cups were staggered across a table, each one a little farther away. Getting the first cup was relatively easy — seven or eight tries at the most. Then they went after the second. If they missed, they had to return to the first cup. Every three or four minutes, they were able to fill both the first and second cups. But the third cup was proving impossible, and each failure elicited loud groans.

"This is the one!" Hayes urged in a frequent and futile refrain.

About two hours in, they shifted strategies, trying first for the cup farthest away. It seemed to hold more potential for success, but an hour later, all they’d achieved was a series of near misses.

A hiatus was called, and the group turned to another trick shot involving balloons, balls and darts. But as Hayes, son Baylor and David Hulett attempted that, Chapel and Beckett Hayes drifted back to the ping-pong balls with Daniel Hulett. Less than an hour later, a mighty whoop erupted as Chapel sank the third ping-pong ball, and everyone rushed back to the table to yell, leap, chest-bump and bear-hug — 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. It’s relief. "There’s no need to ever do it again," he says.

Afterward, Chapel accepted his congratulations with a shrug and a wisp of a grin. "It was luck," he said.

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

It also wasn’t lost on Hayes that his two boys took their own initiative to keep trying the trick shot. "That’s not something I taught them," he says. "That’s something trick shots taught us. They wanted to finish what we started. Again, that’s not me or Laney being great parents. That’s what saying, ‘We have to do a trick shot for 366 days,’ will do to your kids!"

For that fateful final trick shot, anyone else might have masterminded an elaborate trick-shot-to-end-all-trick-shots, finishing off the year with an eye-popping spectacle. Instead, the Hayes family is simply going out in signature style: together. Along with the Hulett brothers, all eight of them lined up behind a table and attempted to flip half-filled water bottles and land them upright at the same time. It obviously was not their first bottle-flipping rodeo. They completed the trick shot in less than two minutes.

"I wanted to do something simple," Hayes says. "And I wanted everybody in the family involved."

Hayes says this isn’t the end of the family’s trick shots, but the string is definitely at an end, and the time has come to savor the accomplishment.

"Honestly, it’s been like everything else incredible in life," he says. "It hasn’t been paradise. It hasn’t been bliss. It has been very hard. It’s been a struggle. But it’s been an adventure of a lifetime."

Hayes, along with his family, head out this week to launch his 29-date Same Drunk Tour, which runs through Sept. 1.