Assistant principal wins huge Powerball prize in NC. Now, she plans to help family
An assistant principal has a family tradition of playing the Powerball game — and it paid off big time.
“It’s really a whole family thing,” $100,000 prize winner Rosalyn Grimes told the North Carolina Education Lottery. “We all like to play together.”
After scoring the big win, Grimes will help her relatives. She hopes to put her prize money toward bills, a family trip and her mom’s house payments, lottery officials wrote in a March 11 news release.
Grimes bought her lucky Powerball ticket at the Travel Store in Blounts Creek, a roughly 125-mile drive southeast from Raleigh. She went for the Quick Pick option, meaning a lottery machine randomly chose her numbers for the March 3 drawing.
Grimes, who had asked her mom to check how her $3 ticket fared, was working at a school when she received the good news.
“I told the principal, ‘I think I kind of just hit the lottery,’” Grimes said.
It turns out, her ticket just missed the $279 million jackpot but still matched enough numbers to make her richer. Since she spent an extra dollar on the Power Play option, her $50,000 prize rose to $100,000, McClatchy News reported.
Grimes, who lives in the Beaufort County town of Aurora, kept $71,547 after taxes.
What to know about Powerball
To score the jackpot in the Powerball, a player must match all five white balls and the red Powerball.
The odds of scoring the jackpot prize are 1 in 292,201,338.
Tickets can be bought on the day of the drawing, but sales times and price vary by state.
Drawings are broadcast Saturdays, Mondays and Wednesdays at 10:59 p.m. ET and can be streamed online.
Powerball is played in 45 states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
This story was originally published March 12, 2025 at 11:26 AM with the headline "Assistant principal wins huge Powerball prize in NC. Now, she plans to help family."
