Austin grad Sawyer Myers is 22 years old and he just finished a four-year stint of playing water polo at Iowa State University, but he’s still trying to stay ahead of his younger brothers.

Sawyer has served as an inspiration to his younger brothers Trey, a 17-year old Austin junior and Lucas, a 12-year-old Austin sixth grader. All three brothers are heavily invested in sports, mostly focusing on volleyball and swimming.

“Sports play a major role in a lot of what we do. We’re all very competitive, whether it’s kicking the soccer ball around, or playing volleyball. Whenever we go on a trip somewhere, we’re always playing something,” Sawyer said. “It’s been interesting watching them grow and Trey has gotten better at me in some sports, although that’s tough for me to admit. He has some size on the volleyball court.”

Like Sawyer before him, Trey swam in the Minnesota Class A State Swimming and Diving Meet and he’s also active in cross country and the Austin club volleyball team. Trey helped start the team after he began playing volleyball with the girls team as a youth. While it was tough for him to learn a new sport that he was thriving to get better at, Trey aways had Sawyer to lean on.

“Sawyer kind of pushed me to be better at every sport. I would always try to beat him in swimming and whenever he showed up to volleyball, I’d try my best against him,” Trey said.

Myers family events can often turn into sports competitions. The brothers have competed in triathlons together and they’ve also stayed active in water skiing and snow skiing. Whenever Lucas has a birthday, it will include a sports-themed competition that will involve football, dodgeball and other sports.

Lucas may be the smallest of the boys, but he’s not slowing down and he doesn’t show intimidation around his big brothers.

“It’s really hard to beat them, because they’re so much bigger,” Lucas said. “They motivate me.”

Sawyer, who will work a management job for Simplot in Boise, Idaho after he graduates from ISU Saturday, is mostly done with playing organized sports, but he said he learned a lot from four years of water polo. Not only did the sport test him physically, it also helped learn employable skills as he was the club’s treasurer for a few years.

“I fell in love with the sport pretty quick because it has swimming and it’s more a of a team sport. There’s a lot more to it than just swimming as fast as you can. It taught me a lot about leadership,” Sawyer said. “We had to coach ourselves, plan our own tournaments and manage everything.”

While Sawyer helped run the team he was playing on in college, Trey has helped start a sport in Austin. At a young age, he recruited all of his friends to play club volleyball and he’s put in a lot of work to help the boys team get to where it is today.

“Playing volleyball was pretty tough early on because I was kind of shy around girls and that was tough in itself, but it really helped me learn the sport and they helped me learn how to stand on each rotation,” Trey said. “It’s pretty cool that my mom and I helped drive the sport and it’s fun to get any of my friends out there playing volleyball.”

The Austin volleyball team will close out its regular season when it hosts Prior Lake in its final regular season match at 7:15 p.m. Monday.