Georgia Henneberry reports from the pits on Fox’s telecast of the Indianapolis 500 on May 23, 2025.

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.”

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“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.

“’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.”

Blah Battlehawks

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.”

Hub hubbub

That didn’t last long.

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.

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