She’s “aggressively competitive” and “on a scale of 1-10 as a competitor, I’m a 12.” She turns everyday life into a game. “And I fully intend to win,” she adds, “even if no one else knows we’re competing.”
This young, driven professional is Bethany Oglesby, a Firefighter/Paramedic for Rural Metro Fire at Station 25 in Mascot. She’s 32 and in her third year on the job. One
Bethany Oglesby
Rural Metro veteran describes her as “a real go-getter.” No argument here.
Her latest win was in the annual Rural Metro “Deck the Halls Christmas Decoration Campaign,” in which the stations compete for the best-decorated presentation during the holidays. If you guessed that her Station 25 won, you’re right. She was the leader of the project too, ably assisted by her station partner, EMT/Engineer Frederick Beil, along with a few others.
The campaign was promoted on Rural Metro’s Facebook page, where anyone could vote, and vote they did. When voting ended at midnight on Christmas Eve, Station 25 won over Station 36 by fewer than 100 votes. See KTT’s coverage here.
“We’ve got bragging rights for taking 36 down, and I’m already planning for Christmas 2026,” she said. “Two straight years to win sounds great to me.” In announcing the contest winner, Rural Metro said: “…Your creativity and holiday spirit shone the brightest, earning the most likes and bringing festive cheer to the Mascot community!”
Rural Metro’s Station 25 won the Deck the Halls decorating
contest with Bethany Ogle leading the decorating project
“We came up with the idea of the decorations to look kind of like the Griswold house in ‘National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation’ movie, and then we started throwing lights on the station,” she said. That was on Nov. 2, and she said it took two days to get it done. She did the shopping at Walmart and bought seven strands of lights, each 60 feet long. And she says it required a lot of extension cords, so many that she can’t recall how many.
Finally, the work was done. They gathered to turn the lights on. “Just like the movie, I plugged it in to turn it on… and nothing. I had to go back and check all of the connections and cords again, and then we tried again …. and it worked,” she said.
She said the final product had a firefighting theme. It instantly attracted residents of Mascot to the station at 8414 Old Rutledge Pike. “Mascot is a tight community, and they came by to see the station and stopped to take pictures. We have a lot of support in the community.”
Oglesby’s drive to compete and win isn’t new. She graduated from Carter High School in 2012, and it was a great year for her. She was a multi-sport athlete – softball, volleyball, basketball, track, and cross country. But softball was her sport. Two months after graduation in August 2012, she was honored by the 2012 Greater Knoxville Sports Hall of Fame as the “High School Female Athlete of the Year” that included all sports. “The best part of that evening was sitting at the table with Coach Pat Summitt and getting to talk with her. Talk about cool,” she says.
Her parents are Terry and Tammy. He is the president of Fisher Lane Funding LLC, and Tammy is a secretary at Carter Middle School.
There have been other honors as well. She was selected to the 2011 TSWA All-State Team, as well as the All-Prep Xtra and All-KIL teams, in both her junior and senior years. She left Knoxville, accepting an athletic scholarship to play softball from 2012-2014 at Western Kentucky University (WKU). “UT talked to me, but I wanted to go out of state and see what the world was like.” A coaching change at WKU ended her college career after two years.
After leaving WKU, she worked for six months in 2016 as a groundskeeper for the Knoxville Smokies. In 2020, she became a Corrections Officer at the Knox County Sheriff’s Office (KCSO) Detention Center. When her training class graduated, she won two major awards: the Tim Debord Award for Outstanding Officer of the class and the Angela Payne Academic Award. But she left the jail job after a year.
While working at the jail, she began taking Criminal Justice classes at the University of Arizona Global Campus and graduated in 2023.
After leaving the jail job, she had a conversation with a close family friend — Rural Metro Battalion Chief Matthew Clift. She says the chief was instrumental in her decision to join the agency. “He’s known me for a long time and who I am, and he basically told me, ‘Give it (Rural Metro) a shot.’ And here we are today.”
The work — what they see and hear — is not without emotional trauma for emergency professionals. Her most stressful call to date? “On Thanksgiving Day in 2023, I was doing my clinicals to become a paramedic and was riding on an AMR ambulance, and we got a call about a possible suicide. Right after the family finished eating Thanksgiving dinner, their 13-year-old son went upstairs to his room. The father found him hanging from a ceiling fan. He tried CPR, and we continued it. I did everything in my power, and it didn’t work. Hearing the young man’s parents screaming in pain is something I will never forget. Raw emotions.”
Once in the ambulance, Oglesby continued to work on the teen as they headed to East Tennessee Children’s Hospital’s (ETCH) emergency room. He was pronounced dead at ETCH. “We do everything we can do and are trained to do, and sometimes you don’t get the outcome you want.”
And just recently, before Thanksgiving Day 2025, she and Beil answered a cardiac arrest call for a 29-year-old miner at the Nyrstar Zinc mine in Mascot. The victim was 1,400 feet down. “As the paramedic on scene, I traveled on an elevator underground into the mine shaft to assist with the resuscitation efforts that were being performed. We did advanced life support in the mine, coming up on the elevator, and on the way to Jefferson Memorial Hospital, but the man did not survive.”
These experiences make home time even more special when she heads home to relax with her wife, Katie Oglesby, and their two children – daughter Reece, 6, and their son Roman, 4. She’s still playing softball too, with the Bombers in a women’s league in Morristown, and she enjoys water sports at her parents’ home on Douglas Lake. “I have to stay busy with things. I hate just sitting down and doing nothing.”
Her father taught her during her softball days to leave things on her mind behind and focus on just softball. She does the same today with her work. “I do a good job of leaving work at work. I don’t take it home, and Dad taught me this,” she says.
She’s driven to win. Why is she so driven by her job? “I am drawn to work with a purpose. I thrive in high-pressure situations. Sitting still isn’t an option for me. I thrive on the controlled chaos and responsibility of this job. I wanted a career that challenges me mentally and physically, pushes me to keep improving, and makes a difference. Rural Metro has helped me find my purpose, my calling, and it’s been the best decision I’ve ever made. This is my second family.”
Tom King has been the editor of newspapers in Texas and California, and also worked in Tennessee and Georgia. If you have someone you think we should consider featuring, please email Tom at the link with his name or text him at 865-659-3562.
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