Rebecca Simmons of Kings Mountain said she won a $200,000 Powerball prize thanks to her daughter’s good luck.

“She’s the lucky one,” Simmons said. “Every time she enters something she wins.”

Simmons said her husband decided to get a ticket for the drawing on Wednesday Aug. 23 when he stopped at the Linwood Family Mart on Linwood Road in Kings Mountain.

Hoping her adult daughter’s good luck would rub off, Simmons asked her husband to wait for her to pick some numbers. “Three of the numbers I picked involved my daughter,” Simmons said. “I used the month and day of her birthday, and her age.”

Simmons didn’t realize she won until the next morning when she was watching WBTV in Charlotte and heard that 16 tickets won big prizes in North Carolina.

“I went to go get the tickets and joked with my husband that, ‘Of course we had the winning ticket, because I had the winning numbers,’” Simmons said. “When I pulled up the numbers and saw that they matched the numbers on the ticket, I couldn’t believe it. I looked at the numbers and then the ticket and at the numbers again.”

Sure enough, Simmons ticket beat odds of one in 913,129 to win $200,000.

She claimed the prize Friday at lottery headquarters in Raleigh. After required state and federal withholdings, she took home $139,002. She plans to use the money to finish remodeling her home.

“We’ve been remodeling our home one room at a time for the last 12 years,” Simmons said. “We’re down to one room, and this will let us finish it as well as add a deck and do some landscaping.”

The ticket matched the numbers on the four white balls and the Powerball to win $50,000. Because Simmons’ husband added the $1 Power Play feature, the prize quadrupled to $200,000 when the 4X multiplier was drawn.

Ticket sales from draw games like Powerball make it possible for the lottery to raise more than half a billion dollars a year for the state. For details on how lottery funds have made a difference in all of North Carolina’s 100 counties, click on the “For Education” section of the lottery’s website.