RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — N.C. State football player Davin Vann was on the move, tiptoeing his way between obstacles in the Wolfpack's indoor practice facility midway through a game week.
And it had nothing to do with the upcoming visit from Wake Forest.
Instead, he stepped carefully through and over boxes of canned food, stacks of bottled water, shopping bags full of diapers, personal hygiene products and batteries. The defensive end known for chasing down ballcarriers was playing quarterback in a way, leading a donation drive to help victims of Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina and aided by his family's moving company.
The drive — so successful that it has extended to run the rest of the week — is just one example of multiple sports-related efforts seeking to help those affected by the storm that left a shocking trail of devastation through parts of the Carolinas, Georgia and Tennessee.
“That was kind of my mindset going into it, kind of ‘I hope we get enough people to at least help a little bit,’” Vann told The Associated Press. “So yeah, it was way more than I expected.”
The death toll has topped 200 after the Category 4 storm rolled through the southeast last week, with flooding washing out roads to cut off entire communities that lack electricity, water and cellular service. Relief efforts are ongoing through multiple states, and that includes from college and professional sports.
In Charlotte, David Tepper — owner of the NFL’s Carolina Panthers — and his wife Nicole have committed $3 million to relief efforts through their foundation. The NBA’s Charlotte Hornets and the NASCAR racing team owned by retired NBA and North Carolina great Michael Jordan have each committed $1 million toward relief efforts.
Not far away in Concord, the Charlotte Motor Speedway track known for NASCAR races has spent multiple days holding a donation drive and extended that work into Thursday due to strong community response. Closer to the devastation, a parade of trucks carrying donations arrived at the North Wilkesboro Speedway on Thursday.
In eastern Tennessee, Bristol Motor Speedway was designated as a regional disaster relief center, accepting donations.
“Our communities, friends and loved ones are hurting, and we stand ready to assist in any way that we possibly can,” said Jerry Caldwell, the speedway’s president and general manager.
Elsewhere in that state, Eastern Tennessee State University has been collecting donations, sending four vans to a nearby high school being used as a shelter with four truckloads taken to a church in Erwin. The Buccaneers host Chattanooga in football on Saturday with fans asked to bring more supplies with them to donate.
And in Georgia, Augusta National — the home to the famed Masters golf tournament — and the Community Foundation for the Central Savannah River Area has announced a joint $5 million donation to a relief fund assisting the greater Augusta area.
North Carolina State's indoor practice facility and Carter-Finley Stadium share the same parking area as the Lenovo Center, the arena home of the NHL's Carolina Hurricanes in Raleigh. As Vann worked into Wednesday evening helping people unload donations, the Hurricanes held a fundraiser tied to their preseason game against the Nashville Predators and raised roughly $280,000 for Helene relief.
Wolfpack coach Dave Doeren said Vann's mother, Joy Hall, who owns the Cary-based Joyful Movers company that opened in 2006, reached out shortly after the storm. Their plan was to collect supplies to deliver to the Durham Rescue Mission's larger relief efforts.
As Vann sifted through supplies Wednesday evening and greeted donors with a handshake, Hall was there with other family members, working her way through a line of flattened cardboard boxes to prepare them to be packed with donations. Meanwhile, cars kept trickling in, sometimes with supplies stacked high in the backseat.
“I was really thankful to them,” Doeren said Thursday of Vann's family. “It's an uplifting deal that they're doing. And now it's just multiplied into a lot of people being involved in it. And so a lot of our players have been helping, a lot of staff — our recruiting staff, our (operations) staff — a lot of hands on deck loading trucks, people in the community coming in and dropping off things for all the folks that need it.”
Vann's donation drive has already filled six trucks with supplies as of Thursday, with more to come.
“It’s very heartwarming,” Vann said. “I’m very happy to see the community is more than willing to give their time and their money to help the people of western North Carolina, even if they’ve never met them before.”
AP Sports Writers John Raby in West Virginia and Teresa M. Walker in Tennessee contributed to this report.
A makeshift sign in a vehicle window helps direct people arriving at a donation drive led by N.C. State defensive end Davin Vann to collect supplies to help Hurricane Helene victims in western North Carolina, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024 in Raleigh, N.C. (AP Photo/Aaron Beard)
N.C. State defensive end Davin Vann, right, carries donations collected to help Hurricane Helene victims in western North Carolina, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024 in Raleigh, N.C. (AP Photo/Aaron Beard)
N.C. State defensive end Davin Vann works among the donations collected to help Hurricane Helene victims in western North Carolina, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024 in Raleigh, N.C. (AP Photo/Aaron Beard)
N.C. State defensive end Davin Vann and his mother, Joy Hall, work among the donations collected to help Hurricane Helene victims in western North Carolina, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024 in Raleigh, N.C. (AP Photo/Aaron Beard)
NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. stocks are rising on Friday after a surprisingly strong jobs report raised optimism about the economy but also forced a rethink about how much lower interest rates will go over the next year.
The S&P 500 was up 0.5% in afternoon trading after paring a bigger gain. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 187, or 0.5%, as of 12:55 p.m. Eastern time. The Nasdaq composite was 0.9% higher.
Banks, cruise-ship operators and other companies whose profits tend to benefit the most from a stronger economy led the way. Norwegian Cruise Line steamed 3.6% higher, JPMorgan Chase rose 2.7% and the small companies in the Russell 2000 index gained 1.4%.
Stock indexes are clawing back some of their losses from earlier in the week, caused by worries that worsening tensions in the Middle East could lead to disruptions in the global flow of oil. Crude prices ticked higher again on Friday, but the moves were more modest than earlier in the week, as the world continues its wait to see how Israel will respond to Iran’s missile attack from Tuesday.
In the meantime, the strength of the U.S. economy reclaimed its spot as the top mover of markets.
Treasury yields jumped in the bond market after the U.S. government said employers added 254,000 more jobs to their payrolls last month than they cut. That was an acceleration from August’s hiring pace of 159,000 and blew past economists’ forecasts.
It was a “grand slam” of a report, according to Lindsay Rosner, head of multi-sector investing within Goldman Sachs Asset Management. She said policy makers at the Federal Reserve, who have been trying to pull off the difficult feat of keeping the economy humming while getting inflation under control, “must be smiling.”
Friday’s report capped a week of mostly encouraging data on the job market. Such strength helps allay one of Wall Street’s top questions: whether the job market will continue to hold up after the Federal Reserve earlier kept interest rates at a two-decade high.
Before Friday’s jobs report, data had been showing the general trend was a slowdown in hiring by U.S. employers. That’s not surprising given that the Fed had been trying to press the brake hard enough on the economy to stamp out high inflation.
But Friday's blowout numbers bolstered hope that the U.S. economy will indeed avoid a recession, particularly now that the Federal Reserve has made a drastic switch in policy and begun cutting interest rates to give it more juice. The Fed last month lowered its main interest rate for the first time in more than four years and indicated more cuts will arrive through next year.
Friday's jobs data was strong enough to push traders to downgrade their forecasts for how steeply the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates by at its next meeting in November. They’re now forecasting a near-zero probability that the Fed will deliver another larger-than-usual cut, according to data from CME Group. That’s down from the better-than-a-coin-flip’s chance they saw a week ago.
That in turn sent the yield on the two-year Treasury shooting up to 3.91% from 3.71% late Thursday. The 10-year yield rose to 3.97% from 3.85%.
Such increases in yields hurt stocks of home builders, real-estate owners and other companies that would have benefited the most from a continued easing in rates for mortgages and other loans.
D.R. Horton, PulteGroup and Lennar all sank at least 2% for three of the biggest losses in the S&P 500. Home Depot dropped 1.2% and was the biggest reason the Dow Jones Industrial Average was lagging other stock indexes.
Friday's jobs report was so strong that it means the Federal Reserve may ultimately not need to cut interest rates as much as investors had been thinking.
“This report tells the Fed that they still need to be careful as a strong labor market along with sticky housing/shelter data shows that it won’t be easy to engineer meaningfully lower inflation from here in the nearer term,” according to Scott Wren, senior global market strategist at Wells Fargo Investment Institute.
At Bank of America, economist Aditya Bhave said he expects the Federal Reserve to stop cutting when its federal funds rate reaches a range of 3% to 3.25%, or a quarter of a percentage point higher than he was earlier forecasting. The rate is currently sitting in a range of 4.75% to 5%.
Also Friday, some 45,000 dockworkers at East and Gulf coast ports are returning to work after their union reached a deal to suspend its three-day strike until Jan. 15 to provide time to negotiate a new contract. That helped calm worries that a lengthy strike could have pushed up on inflation and dragged on the economy.
In the oil market, the price for a barrel of Brent crude, the international standard, rose 1.4% to $78.72 per barrel and is up more than 10% for the week. A barrel of benchmark U.S. crude rose 1.7% to $74.98, up from roughly $68 at the start of the week.
In stock markets abroad, indexes rose across much of Europe following the strong jobs report from the world’s largest economy.
In Asia, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng jumped 2.8% in its latest sharp swerve. It soared a bit more than 10% this week on excitement about a flurry of recent announcements from Beijing to prop up the world’s second-largest economy.
AP Business Writers Yuri Kageyama and Matt Ott contributed.
FILE - Signs mark the intersection of Broadway and Wall Street in the Financial District on Oct. 2, 2024, in New York. Trinity Church is in the background. (AP Photo/Peter Morgan, File)
FILE - The entrance to the New York Stock Exchange at Wall and New Streets is shown on Oct. 2, 2024, in New York. (AP Photo/Peter Morgan, File)
FILE - People pass the New York Stock Exchange on Oct. 1, 2024, in New York. (AP Photo/Peter Morgan, File)
Currency traders work near a screen showing the Korea Composite Stock Price Index (KOSPI) and the foreign exchange rate between U.S. dollar and South Korean won, right, at the foreign exchange dealing room of the KEB Hana Bank headquarters in Seoul, South Korea, Friday, Oct. 4, 2024. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)
A currency trader watches monitors near a screen showing the Korea Composite Stock Price Index (KOSPI), left, and the foreign exchange rate between U.S. dollar and South Korean won at the foreign exchange dealing room of the KEB Hana Bank headquarters in Seoul, South Korea, Friday, Oct. 4, 2024. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)
Currency traders watch monitors near a screen showing the Korea Composite Stock Price Index (KOSPI) at the foreign exchange dealing room of the KEB Hana Bank headquarters in Seoul, South Korea, Friday, Oct. 4, 2024. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)
