Just a month after celebrating his 18th birthday, which made him eligible to collect lottery prizes, Andrew Schmidt is doing just that.

Schmidt and four of his co-workers at the body shop of Norcan Leasing Ltd. made their way to Lotteries Yukon's offices this morning to get all the paperwork done so they can collect their $193,926 prize on the 6/49 ticket the group bought.

Dan Hurley, Casey Wrightmeyer, James Roche and Tristen Lester joined Schmidt in making arrangements to collect the windfall.

It is the first time in Yukon Lotteries Commission general manager Carol Arntzen's 20 years at the offices she's seen a group win a large prize.

The crew at the body shop each normally put $10 or so into a lottery pool, with Schmidt being the most recent addition to the buy-in.

After picking up the group's tickets at the Main Street lottery booth downtown, Wrightmeyer decided to check them Thursday at the McCrae Petro Canada station.

Scanning through the tickets, the machine came up to read "major winner" so he went over to the clerk and asked if it meant it meant there was more than a $10 win.

The young man's face "just fell" when he checked the ticket, Wrightmeyer recalled.

The group had matched five of the 6/49 numbers to win.

Staff suggested Wrightmeyer sign his name to the back of the ticket.

"It kind of started hitting home," Wrightmeyer said this morning.

Sitting down, he was able to sign his name, but had trouble with his address.

After finally getting to that, he phoned Hurley, who initially thought Wrightmeyer might have been in an accident, given the high number of crashes that were happening on Whitehorse roads Thursday.

It took a while for each of them to believe the news. As Schmidt noted, even his parents were skeptical until he treated them to dinner last night.

As they came into Lotteries Yukon today, though, the news became a bit more real as they got the paperwork out of the way so they can receive their cheque in about 10 days.

That gives them a little more than a week to decide what they'll do with the cash, but each of them already has a few ideas.

While Schmidt has his sights set on a new truck and snow machine, his co-workers are looking at getting new big-screen TVs, with the remainder being used to pay off bills or set aside in savings or investments.

As they wait to collect the big win, they'll also each have a couple of bucks to spend after winning $10 on the Extra number in the lottery.