Competing in the men’s open division of the USA Adult National Volleyball Tournament in Denver last month, the siblings from a male volleyball desert, along with current and former college teammates of the Helena-raised duo, and friends of friends united under a common banner to defeat seven of the best over-18 teams and collect a $5,000 cash prize.

“It was more pushing the fact the team was all NAIA guys,” Caylor said. “In the world of volleyball, it gets a lot of hype whereas NAIA, for men’s volleyball, is about the same as [NCAA] Division I.

“It kind of gets overlooked and doesn’t get much credit…We kind of wanted to put an emphasis on that.”

“That was the best part, because we got to beat a lot of the NCAA players and all the top guys, supposedly,” Caydann said. “That was probably the best part of the tournament.”

“Team NAIA” went 5-2 in round-robin pool play, earning the No. 2 seed for bracket play and sweeping the best-of-three semifinal and championship matches, knocking off an opponent that had triumphed earlier in pool play.

“In the semifinals, with me in the middle, we shut down the supposed best player in the gym,” Caydann said. “He did not hit very well.”

That player was California State University Northridge redshirt sophomore, American Volleyball Coaches Association All-American and USA U23 National Team member Jalen Phillips.

“We just put up a solid block,” Caydann said. “We forced him to hit a lot of line and he just wasn’t able to do it. So he was making hitting errors. I think I blocked him like three times in a row.”

Caylor and Caydann began playing volleyball at an early age.

Their father, Travers Cox, first began playing the sport in middle school. Originally from Butte, Travers grew up in Anchorage, Alaska, while his father was stationed at a nearby Air Force base.

Travers found he could do things with a volleyball others couldn’t, similar traits he witnessed in his own sons decades later. Instead of a collegiate career, Travers traversed the United States playing for and coaching teams he assembled. He participated in various divisions of the tournament his sons captured, an experience he shared as an assistant coach.

“They’re more successful than I ever was, which really upsets me in some aspects, in a fun way,” Travers said with a laugh. “I see them doing what I wanted to do when I was younger.

“I wanted to be in that open division, I wanted to be winning that division. It’s fun to see that. I think I’m more jealous that they’re doing stuff I wanted to do.”

Without men’s volleyball sanctioned by the MHSA, the brothers turned first to girls club teams.

By their middle teenage years, that became impossible as the volleyball net height changes for different genders. Caylor, not finding a steady club team scene in Montana, was forced to play on Pacific Northwest-based teams 12 or 14 hours away.

Practice with those club programs was impossible, but the siblings’ superior skills kept them welcomed among groups with which they’d play one to three tournaments per season.

“I remember my dad having us when we were younger, come out to the Y and coaching us,” Caydann said. “We used to play deck volleyball all the time in our backyard.

“I think that’s when I started to really love it, playing deck volleyball because it was a lot of fun.”

“Part of it is realizing how much it takes to get to do something that I enjoy like that,” Caylor said. “I think it makes it a little sweeter. If you do something for too long, you can get burnt out. Looking forward to that next opportunity every time helped grow that passion.”

Caylor, 23, graduated from Helena Capital in 2019. Caydann spent two years as a Bruin before transferring to Jamestown High School (North Dakota). There Caylor played collegiately for the Jimmies, exhausting his COVID season in 2024 to experience a campaign with freshman Caydann and be coached by their father.

Caylor, as a 5-foot-9 outside hitter, recorded better than 700 career collegiate kills and 130 aces. He recorded 102 total blocks in a five-year career, accounting for 898.5 points.

Caylor was an Honorable Mention All-American, Great Plains Athletic Conference Player of the Year and a first-team All-Conference selection in 2023, the same season his father was tabbed GPAC Coach of the Year. Caylor amassed four All-GPAC first-team accolades.

Caydann was a third-team NAIA All-American and GPAC Player of the Year as a freshman. He transferred to Saint Xavier University (Illinois) and earned second-team All-America accolades for a 357-kill, 53-ace, 197-dig, 52-block campaign.

Saint Xavier tied an NAIA record with 31 consecutive victories, falling to No. 1-ranked The Master’s in the NAIA National Championship Match on May 3. Caydann retains two seasons of eligibility to chase first-team honors and that national title.

“I enjoy the difficulty of [volleyball],” Caylor said. “If you ever played volleyball, you’ll know what I mean. If you watch a high level and you try to replicate something that any of the Olympic athletes are doing, it’s very difficult.

“It’s not quite the same as other sports, I’d say, because the reaction time is one of, if not the shortest of just about any sport. Some of the things you have to do are incredibly difficult. It’s just amazing when you can do some of that stuff.”

Caylor played professionally overseas last fall, a journey that originally began in Finland but ended in Albania because of his perceived inability to perform at outside hitter due to height.

He played for Klubi Shumësportësh Skënderbeu in the Albanian Superliga, his team finishing second in regular-season standings and runner-up in the playoffs. Caylor’s Instagram page is a shrine to a decorated volleyball career, his bio touting a 43-inch vertical jump that made it all possible.

“I’ve had so many challenges, growing up in an area without boys volleyball, battling consistent bullying through school, lacking height, and for the most part, lacking exposure to a big part of the volleyball world in the USA,” Caylor wrote on Instagram in November 2024. “Dealing with constant doubt and negative views on my height, and where I come from, allowing people to just write me off.

“I’m glad to have faced these challenges because it has made me a stronger person. Someone who doesn’t give up when things are tough. It made me persevere, it made me a better problem solver, allowed me to work on myself in more ways than I could ever have imagined. Adversity creates change for the better or the worse. I’m glad I have stuck with it and finally become a professional volleyball player.”

Caydann wants to follow his brother’s footsteps.

Currently, they’re both in Helena working out and providing lessons to up-and-coming volleyball players like they once were. This weekend, the brothers plan to travel to Portland for a doubles tournament, another piece to the puzzle proving NAIA guys and men’s volleyball players from Helena can play at a high level.

“Playing [volleyball] has been a blessing for us,” Caydann said. “We’ve gotten to travel the world.

“It just allows you to get all over the place, instead of just locally. You get to meet a group of guys that are gonna be your lifelong friends.”

It’s a happy, and looking back improbable, homecoming looming for Georgia Henneberry this weekend as the IndyCar series roars into town.

Henneberry, who grew up in Fenton and at one time was a competitive horse rider who later aspired to work in marketing, has taken a whole different career turn and now is a pit reporter for Fox’s IndyCar telecasts. She is set to be on the job Sunday night when the series stops at World Wide Technology Raceway, in Madison. It’s a place Henneberry knows well — she raced and worked there in a variety of capacities including with social media across several years on her way to the national spotlight.

“I’s going to be great,” said Henneberry, a 2016 Summit High graduate who now lives in Indiana. “I’ll be back in my home, somewhere I’m very familiar with and then obviously this is the one race where our family gets to come.”

As a child she was involved in barrel racing, a rodeo event in which she rode horses that ran a course with barrels on them. But …

“We got to a point where financially we just couldn’t do that anymore,” she said.

Her family also enjoyed motor sports, and she recalls being in a restaurant on Watson Road while a NASCAR race was on TV and telling her mother she wanted to become a driver. The next day she got a go-kart, at age 13, and became involved with Margay Racing.

“It was kind of off and away and within the next five or six years we were doing national touring with karting and on the Margay team,” she said. “We kind of jumped right into it.”

Henneberry was very successful, including winning the Yamaha senior championship in 2014, and wanted to become an IndyCar or NASCAR driver. That didn’t happen, but her interest in motor sports led her to working at Gateway International Raceway, as the track then was called and where she had raced for several years. Henneberry made connections that led to an opportunity to do social media work for the United States Auto Club.

“I’m a pretty social person, and so I did that with the thought … not only am I going to get to go to races for free but I’m actually going to get paid to go to the racetrack, which is so awesome,” she said.

So Henneberry, who had stops at Meramec, Mizzou, Maryville and IUPUI en route to getting a degree in communications, early in her career was asked if she was interested interviewing racers. She had a blunt answer:

“’No. Absolutely not; that’s so scary.’ I could not even imagine doing that. But it kind of snowballed, and I fell in love with that. So the path came back together as I really wanted to stay in motor sports. I’m very motivated to do this, but now I want to be on the mic.”

Next was working at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway then for IndyCar. She also has covered Formula E for Roku, traveling the world, and has worked with IMSA, Supercross and NASCAR.

“Pretty much if it has a motor I was working it,” she said.

The journey led to her being hired last year as a pit reporter for NBC’s IndyCar coverage. The series has moved to Fox this year and so has Henneberry, although she wasn’t sure she’d be hired because she would have to miss the first part of the season to give birth to her first child, a boy who now is four months old.

“I immediately kind of told myself I wouldn’t be offended if I didn’t get the job, knowing I was going to have to miss races,” she said.

But that wasn’t a problem for Fox, which she said has been “incredibly supportive.” She will be working her fifth race for the network on Sunday (7 p.m. on KTVI, Channel 2 locally) after missing the first three while on maternity leave.

Henneberry will be broadcasting from the place she planted her roots, from racing on the go-kart track (where she won a championship) to working in the offices.

“St. Louis holds obviously a near and dear place in my heart,” she said. “So whenever we get to come back I always hype it up and talk up the town and the track. … I love that track and I know it like the back of my hand.

“It’s going to be so awesome coming back.”

The Battlehawks were a dud on the field last Sunday in their United Football League semifinal contest, falling behind the D.C. Defenders 20-6 by halftime in a game they lost 36-18 while drawing boos from the hometown crowd. But despite the dull performance, they fared well in the TV ratings.

Nielsen, which measures viewership, says 4.2% of the market tuned to KTVI for Fox’s telecast. The number was tracking higher before halftime, when the rating was above 5, before tailing off as the B-hawks sunk. Nonetheless, it tied for the team’s highest-rated game in St. Louis of the season, albeit short of the 6.8 rating the club’s playoff game last year drew.

The UFL show goes on Saturday in the Dome without the Battlehawks, and while their absence undoubtedly will have a negative impact on attendance that won’t slow ABC’s production plans for its national telecast of the DC-Birmingham league title game (KDNL, Channel 30 locally at 7 p.m.). Joe Tessitore (play-by-play) and Jordan Rodgers (analysis) are set to call the game with Sam Acho and Tom Luginbill reporting from the sidelines.

In addition to the traditional coverage, ESPN+ (streaming) presents an “AudioCast” alternate version. That will have microphones on players, coaches and referees without commentators, plus microphones and chest cameras on an offensive and defensive player from both teams.

“In collaboration with the UFL, we have worked all season long to establish an unprecedented array of microphones and cameras to bring fans inside the game like they’ve never seen or heard before,” ESPN vice president of sports production Bryan Jaroch said in a statement. “Our work culminates on Saturday night in primetime, in the biggest game, with this dynamic alternate viewing experience.”

Sports Hub STL, which launched in February while being billed as the first media outlet in the market to offer a wide array of video sports content to be delivered strictly digitally, much of it live, is no more.

But the venture hasn’t folded. It simply has a new name, STL Sports Central, the result of a legal squabble over its “Sports Hub” branding that led to a lawsuit being filed in federal district court alleging trademark infringement. Beasley Media Group said in the complaint that the name encroached on what has been used since at least 2009 by WBZ — an FM station in Boston it owns and is “better known as 98.5 The Sports Hub.”

Beasley asked for a jury trial and did not list a monetary amount it sought.

Dave Greene, a co-owner of Sports Hub STL, told the Post-Dispatch at the time that he though the suit was “silly” and that he was having his lawyers look into it. He now says it’s not worth it to put up a legal fight.

“Ultimately in instances like this you have two choices — spend months and months of time and thousands and thousands of dollars (which all goes to lawyers) to defend a ridiculous claim, or bite the bullet and go a different direction,” he said in a statement posted on social media.

“Out of respect for our staff who have worked incredibly hard and our followers who seem to really enjoy what we are doing, we have decided our money will best be spent by using it to invest in the product as we continue to change the game in St. Louis sports coverage. For us, this is a bump in the road and onward we go.”

STL Sports Central is the name of the digital sports platform Hayden See started as an eighth grader in 2016 and had grown into attracting nearly 200,000 followers by the time he joined Sports Hub STL to organize social media and merchandising aspects before it debuted.

Greene also is an owner of Big Toe Media, which recently took over former all-sports station KFNS (590 AM) and changed the call letters to KLIS while dropping the sports-talk format in favor of discussing a wide array of topics.