Good News Friday: North Carolina athletes represent at Winter Olympics

North Carolina athletes show out at the Olympics. Plus, early voting gets under way and NC leads the way on life-saving emergency response tech.

I don’t mean to be cliche by starting my weekly column off discussing the weather, but this is Good News Friday, after all, so how could I not after a week like that? Following back-to-back winter storms, much of North Carolina saw the pendulum swing the other way, with temperatures surpassing 70 degrees here in Charlotte. 

Sometimes you just need a good false spring to help thaw you out of your home. 

That said, let’s rewind to those icy times for just a minute. Sometimes when I’m checking my usual sources of good news around the state, I come across a story that’s a perfect fit for Good News Friday but happened weeks ago and somehow slipped by me. 

That was the case of the story about a 12-year-old girl in King, a small town northwest of Winston-Salem, who built a legitimate igloo-influenced shelter during the winter storm that passed through in January. Check out this video and tell me that girl doesn’t have a bright future in engineering. 

That said, the best kind of ice is on the television, thousands of miles away, with world-class athletes competing on it. I’ve been enjoying the first week of the Winter Olympics in Milan, Italy, and that’s where we’ll start Good News Friday. 

North Carolina athletes represent the United States and home countries in Winter Olympics

As the Summer Olympics kicked off in Paris in 2024, I wrote about famed Olympians past and present who called North Carolina home. Now as we kick off the 2026 Winter Olympics we have a whole new slate of Tar Heels to root for. 

With NHL players competing in the Olympics for the first time in 12 years, many of our NC reps this year will be familiar names to Carolina Hurricanes fans. Five of the team’s players will suit up for their respective home countries during the games. 

The only one representing the United States is defenseman Jacob Slavin, which took care of business against Latvia on Thursday, winning 5-1. Meanwhile, Sebastian Aho is playing for Finland while Nikolaj Ehlers and Freddie Andersen are teaming up with the Denmark team. Seth Jarvis joined Canada, favorites to win the gold, at the last minute as a replacement.

Mystique Ro, who was a track-and-field athlete with Queens University of Charlotte before discovering a passion for bobsled and skeleton racing, will be competing in the latter this year in Milan. Races kick off today.  

Current Duke University student Eunice Lee is attending her second Winter Olympics. Left out of the action as an alternate in 2022, Lee is expected to compete as a member of Team USA’s short-track speed-skating relay team this year. 

Eunice Lee (16) competes in the women’s 1000-meter quarterfinal during the U.S. Olympic short track speedskating trials Saturday, Dec. 18, 2021, in Kearns, Utah. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)

NC leads the way on life-saving emergency response tech

When people call 911, they don’t usually put much thought into the technology that ensures that, in their most urgent time of need, someone answers. This story might get a little wonky, but hang with me because it might save your life. 

North Carolina has been strengthening its Emergency Services IP Network, known as ESINet, for years. The technology allowed residents to place emergency calls from impacted communities to partnering first-responder agencies during Hurricane Helene. 

This week, the NC 911 Board extended those capabilities beyond state lines, partnering with the Washington DC Office of Unified Communications, AT&T, and Johnston County 911 to deliver emergency calls to Tactical Homeland Operations Response, a mobile communications command center located in the nation’s capital.

The successful demonstration served as a first-of-its-kind proof of concept for the emerging Next Generation 911 technology, affirming our state’s leadership in resilient emergency communications, according to a release from the NC Department of Information Technology (NC DIT).

“This exercise highlights how innovation and technology can save lives, demonstrating that geography is no longer a barrier,” said Teena Piccione, board chair of NC 911 and secretary of the NC DIT. 

NC A&T students march to the polls in defiance of voter suppression

 

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Early voting for the 2026 primaries kicked off across the state on Thursday. You can check out what races to watch here, then be sure to make it to the nearest poll to have your voice heard — whatever it takes to get there. 

That’s what a group of North Carolina A&T students did on Thursday morning, marching to the polls from the Dudley Lawn of the campus there. The march was a politically defiant one, starting in front of the Greensboro Four Statue and going over a mile to the Old County Courthouse to raise awareness for the erasure of the university’s on-campus voting site by Republicans.

Voting locations were also deactivated at Western Carolina University, UNC Greensboro and other campuses. Recently, Cardinal & Pine Senior Editor Billy Ball broke down the controversy in an episode of Billy Ball Explains NC. 

“We want to send a message on the first day of the early voting period that we will not let them silence our voices through voter suppression,” wrote organizers in the lead-up to the march, an uplifting act of defiance in the face of electoral manipulation.

 

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