RALEIGH – A group of ten employees at a Hickory food distributor have won $250,000 as a team playing Mega Millions. The group calls itself “The MDI 10” because they work for Merchants Distributors, Inc. Each team member contributes $1 a week so they can play ten sets of numbers in the Friday drawings.

Gary Baker, a produce and floral buyer for the company, also buys tickets for the group. Each Friday on his lunch break, he gets a haircut and buys the Mega Millions tickets for that night’s draw. The morning after the Friday, Feb. 17 drawing, Scott Campbell, a produce inspector, checked the numbers as he started his shift at 5 a.m.

“I couldn’t even speak,” Campbell said, after realizing they had matched all five white balls. “I didn’t think anybody would believe me.”

He was right.

“I got a text message at 5:47 in the morning saying that we won $250,000 in the lottery,” Baker said. He assumed his coworkers weren’t serious so he went back to sleep. It took Baker seeing a photo of the winning ticket by text message before he started to believe they had really won.

Baker, who is from Hickory, and Campbell, who is from Lincolnton, made the trip to lottery headquarters in Raleigh to claim the prize for the group. The other members of The MDI 10 are: Douglas Dockery and Richard Townsend of Hickory; Michael Burris and Gerald Davis of Taylorsville; Robin Alexander and Terry Smith of Lenoir; Jerry Helton of Granite Falls; and Janice Willard of Maiden. After state and federal taxes were withheld, each claimant’s $25,000 share was worth $17,000.

Campbell said that he and at least one other team member planned to use their winnings to pay for home improvements. Baker said that winning the lottery would help him and his wife pay for a vacation they already had planned. He had some advice for other teams who play the lottery together.

“It pays off just to be persistent and stay in it,” he said.

Through June 30 of last year, Catawba County education programs received more than $27.8 million in lottery funds. By law, those funds pay for teachers’ salaries in grades K-3, school construction projects, need-based college scholarships, and prekindergarten programs for at-risk four-year-olds. To date, the N.C. Education Lottery has raised more than $2.2 billion for these initiatives statewide.