Shumba courting success with or without racket (Photo by Kevin Mosley, The Daily Campus)

Gwinyai Chingoka. If this name doesn’t sound so familiar, it’s probably because this senior, the No. 1 singles player on the SMU men’s tennis team, goes by “Shumba” on campus. Raised in Harare, Zimbabwe, and Johannesburg and Pretoria, South Africa, Shumba came to SMU to follow his dream of becoming a professional tennis player.

Shumba grew up following his father, the president of the Olympic committee in Zimbabwe and one of 12 members of the board of directors for the International Tennis Federation, around to tennis matches. He first touched a racket when he was 6, and he has not put one down since.

It was also in Zimbabwe that Shumba was to meet his future tennis coach, Carl Neufeld. Shumba’s tennis coach at the time had a son who had recently enrolled in the University of Southern California and who was playing for the men’s tennis team there. The coach of the USC team at the time was Neufeld, and when he decided to travel to Zimbabwe with some of his players from USC for a year, he was introduced to Shumba.

After graduating from Clapham High School in Pretoria, Shumba began his freshman year at SMU.

“When I got to the United States, everything was 10 times bigger than it is at home,” he said.

Shumba also recalled how impressed he was with the tennis facilities here. “I had much better equipment, and the facilities were much, much better,” he said.

For the past three years, Shumba has worked his way up and now plays No. 1 singles and No. 3 doubles with fellow teammate, David Kuezer, a freshman from Poland.

Assistant Coach Ignacio Hirigoyen, who played for the SMU men’s tennis team from 1996-1999 and went on to play professional tennis reaching a ranking of 221 in singles, says he has seen a lot of improvement in Shumba since he began coaching two years ago.

“He’s done pretty well this year. His strength is his randomness on the court. He can pretty much hit every shot, but that is also his weakness. Because he can hit every shot, he sometimes gets disorganized. He has the potential to perform a lot better and I think he just needs to realize that,” he said.

Hirigoyen continued, “Shumba knows how he plays; he knows his pattern and just needs to follow it every time. He’s very good at the net, but he is also developing his ground strokes. He should be more aggressive and stick to that instead of being so passive all the time.”

Shumba agrees with Ignacio, saying that “right now I’m working on my ground strokes a lot because I saw that that was one aspect of my game that I could improve a lot more on.”

However, Shumba says his favorite shot is still the volley, as he feels the most comfortable with it and because “I’m in control of the point,” he said.

As for playing for the SMU men’s team and playing against other schools, Shumba says, “I like it a lot because we have a great bunch of guys and we’re all working for the same goal and that helps out with team work. It also gives me the opportunity to see where I stand in my tennis career compared with other players from the best colleges in America. That means a lot to me.”

Fellow teammate and roommate, Federico Murgier of Argentina, says Shumba is “fast, talented, and good at volleying, but needs to work harder to get better. Sometimes he doesn’t go to weights because for him, he feels they’re overrated. I think he needs to work a little bit harder there.”

On living with Shumba, Murgier says he likes it, but he can be a bit messy.

“He never cleans and in the morning, he is too loud.”

Yet, Murgier says Shumba is never negative and that’s the one thing he values the most about him.

“He’s a good friend. I have a very strong relationship with him. He cares about me, the rest of the team, and he’s not selfish. That’s very important to me,” he said.

As forShumba’s career last year, he competed in the NCAA and WAC championships and was also named to the second team All-WAC in doubles. He played in the No. 1 and 2 spots in both singles and doubles at times last year, finishing with six straight set wins in singles and 15-12 overall in doubles.

As for the future, Shumba hopes that his training at SMU will allow him to play professional tennis one day and travel around the world in tournaments.