The video is from 2011, and it’s still turning up in people’s feeds. Five teenagers in tartan kilts, a snare and tenor line, a talent show stage at Lake Howell High School in Winter Park, Florida. And then, halfway through, they stop drumming and start singing Rick Astley.
If you’ve watched it, you’ve probably also wondered who on earth these kids were, and why the kilts.
Here’s everything the video can’t tell you.
Updated September 2026
Who are the Hot Scots drumline?
Students at Lake Howell High School in Seminole County, Florida, who won their school’s 2011 talent show.
Nigel Fernandez uploaded the performance to YouTube on 11 March 2011, under the title that’s since become the search term everyone types: “THE OFFICIAL Hot Scots drum line – 2011.”
They were teenagers then. They’re adults now — private people who happened to have one extremely public afternoon.
Why are they wearing kilts?
This is the question nobody has ever bothered to answer, and the real answer is better than any guess.
Lake Howell’s mascot is the Silver Hawk. There is nothing remotely Scottish about the school. The Hot Scots were invented back in the 1990s by three students — Luis Rivera, Ryan Dixon and Matt Verberg — reportedly as a way of getting out of a day of classes by performing at a school cultural event. The kilts were the whole joke.
Dylan Charles brought the name back fifteen years later.
Which means the 2011 video that millions of people have watched isn’t an original idea at all. It’s a revival — a group of kids reviving a school in-joke they’d only ever heard about.
What song do the Hot Scots play?
Drum corps excerpts, mostly. “We just played some of our favorite drum corps excerpts and then Nigel and I filled in the rest,” Charles said afterwards.
But the bit everyone remembers isn’t drumming at all. Halfway through, they break into an a cappella “Never Gonna Give You Up” — Rick Astley, 1987.
It’s a Rickroll. Performed live. In 2011. At the absolute peak of the joke’s powers.
What does “I lost the game” mean?
One of them shouts it mid-routine, and it’s the moment most modern viewers rewind to check they heard right.
It’s a reference to The Game, which was everywhere online around 2010. The only rule is that thinking about The Game means you’ve lost it — and anyone who loses has to announce it out loud. Which means shouting “I lost the game” in front of a packed auditorium makes every single person in that room lose too.
It’s a 2011 joke, delivered perfectly, which is exactly why it lands like a fossil now.
Did the Hot Scots go on America’s Got Talent?
They didn’t — and by Charles’s account, it wasn’t for lack of trying on the show’s part. He told the site Drumlines of America that America’s Got Talent “became relentless in contacting them for a potential performance.”
They never appeared.
Five Florida teenagers turned down national television, went back to class, and did the bit again the following year.
Did they do it again?
Twice more, at least. There’s a 2012 sequel, uploaded by Fernandez again, and another in 2015.
The routine became a Lake Howell tradition that outlasted the people who started it.
Where are the Hot Scots now?
Dylan Charles went on to march with Infinity Percussion, a competitive WGI independent ensemble. Matt Verberg, one of the original 1990s founders, later started a percussion ensemble of his own, Timber Creek Independent.
Charles on what the video left behind: “I always get recognized at percussion competitions now, and every once in a while random people on the street will recognize me too.”
Why does this video keep going viral?
Not nostalgia. Machinery.
Reaction channels rebuild it into new videos. TikTok has a discovery page for it. Each wave feeds the recommendation algorithm that produces the next one. Scroll the comments and you’ll find people arriving in 2019, 2022, 2025 — all of them convinced they’ve just found it.
The video never stopped being new to somebody.
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