On Saturday, October 1, 2011, a film crew from Nashville set up inside Garner High School in Garner, North Carolina. The star of the shoot was one of the school’s own seniors: Scotty McCreery, 17, who had won the tenth season of American Idol that May.
The video was for “The Trouble With Girls,” his second single. The girl who shared the most scenes with him was not a hired actress. She was Gabi Dugal, a 17-year-old classmate Scotty had known since their very first day of kindergarten. Nearly fifteen years later, he finally said out loud what that casting choice had really been about.
A Video Shot With Real Friends
Scotty McCreery could have filmed the video almost anywhere. According to WRAL in Raleigh, he picked his own high school because he wanted to make it with the friends he had grown up with. He had only just returned for his senior year, and he was taking a full course load because he planned to go to college.
Director Roman White, who had also made videos for Taylor Swift, said the school was the perfect set. He described the idea as an innocent high school story about boys, girls and first love. His classmates played themselves: running science experiments, passing notes in class, playing in a baseball game. Scotty said the goal was to make it believable, because the songs on his debut album were about his own life.
Gabi was one of the students a reporter spoke with that day. She sounded a little starstruck.
“I never thought I’d be on TV, so it’s going to be really weird.” — Gabi Dugal, October 2011
When the finished video premiered later that month, Taste of Country’s reviewer noticed the dark-haired girl in so many of Scotty’s scenes and joked that their chemistry seemed to go beyond the science lab. The review never named her.
The Romance Nobody Saw
Scotty and Gabi started dating that same senior year. He was 17, then 18, and suddenly famous, so they made a choice. Years later, Scotty explained that he had “just kinda been thrust into the limelight” and that the two of them could either call the magazines or keep things on the down low. They chose the down low.
That meant plenty of fans watched Gabi in “The Trouble With Girls” without any idea who she was. The relationship did not really become public until 2016, when Scotty wrote about her in his autobiography, Go Big or Go Home. He has said Gabi read the chapter about her and had the final say over what went in it.
“Kind of How I Courted Gabi”
In 2026, while marking 15 years as a recording artist with a retrospective album called 15, Scotty McCreery looked back on that early video with Music Mayhem Magazine. He laughed as he admitted that giving Gabi the lead role was “kind of how I courted Gabi to date me.”
It fit the song, too. “The Trouble With Girls” was written by Chris Tompkins and Phillip White, two songwriters from the same Alabama hometown, during a writing session in the summer of 2011. Scotty said it felt as if the writers had made it just for him. The single reached No. 17 on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart and was later certified Platinum.
What Came Next
Gabi went on to appear in more of his videos, including “Feelin’ It” and “Five More Minutes,” even though she has never loved the spotlight. Scotty has said she will walk a red carpet with him but prefers to skip the photos and watch from a distance.
In September 2017, Scotty McCreery proposed at the top of a mountain trail near Grandfather Mountain in North Carolina. They married in the North Carolina mountains on June 16, 2018, and shared their first dance to Elvis Presley’s “Can’t Help Falling in Love.”
As it turned out, Gabi had called it long before any music video. Scotty later told the story on The Jennifer Hudson Show: the two of them found her kindergarten diary in her parents’ attic, and all over it, written in hearts, were the words “Mrs. Gabi McCreery.”