Tadala kandulu ngosi: Malawi open champion tennis genius 

Youthful tennis star, Tadala Kandulu Ngosi has broken several records in the field—first as the youngest Malawi Open Champion at 14 years old, which she won three years in a row.

She became the first Malawian tennis player to play at World University Games and got to fourth round and is also the only Malawian who has won three gold medals for the Confederation of Universities and Colleges Sports Association games.

Not only that, but she also broke the record of becoming the only Malawian athlete to date, to win the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) regional championship in the USA and the only Malawian tennis player who has played for the NCAA.

She is now the founder and the executive director for Match Foundation—a local sports for development foundation—and a consultant for Child Fund International where she is the Life Skills Sports for Development specialist.

The Match Foundation was established late 2020 to create a safe space and provide opportunities to children of Malawi, particularly through sports and education.

Being a sports for development foundation, Match embraces the use of sports to address and solve certain social and development challenges.

The youthful founder explains that several factors led her to start this foundation.

“The first reason was to promote an education-minded focus on athletes. I admired the style of education in America where scholarships are given to athletes who perform well in their area of sports but also maintain a certain level of grade point average (GPA).

Beyond that, she says she wanted to come back to groom and train young athletes who would someday compete at the highest level like she did and even more.

“I also know that in Malawi there are not enough infrastructure that provide safe space for young people to play, explore their capabilities and be mentored,” she says.

The Match Foundation is not a private academy. It is there to bring the game of tennis to another level where children from the less privileged communities thrive.

But how did she find herself in tennis? She says that her brother Ronald Kandulu used to play the game, and she would go with him to the Blantyre Youth Centre for games and practice.

One day when his coach asked her to try out, he noticed the star in her and told her so.

“This was the late coach Kausiwa. I believed him and I honestly was a natural talent. Everything became so easy for me, and I ended up being promoted to older categories at a very young age.

“I won every tournament I played and became unbeaten in my category. At 12 years old, I became the first Malawian tennis player to win International Tennis Federation medals at the junior tennis championship in Pretoria, South Africa,” the 32-year-old explains.

Growing up and learning about the sport, Tadala always admired the tennis sisters Venus and Serena Williams because of their resilience to overcome the negative challenges they encountered while playing the game.

She adds: “They also came from a family that rose from rags to riches that’s how I related to them. I do not come from a rich family, I used to walk every day to train. I played without shoes at times, but my mother was very supportive just like Richard Williams, the father to the Williams sisters. She would still encourage my brother and I to keep going but only if we were only in the top 10 class performance.”

However, the young woman who comes from Thondwe in Zomba bemoans the fact that there are few female tennis players locally but reckons that this is because sports authorities have no plans of producing female players.

She says: “it’s a big challenge to bring girls into sports and stay in it. My hope is that through our programming at Match Foundation, we will produce a great number of good female players for the future.”

Since its inception in 2020, the foundation has achieved several things. Currently with 80 children from less privileged communities, the foundation provides full scholarships to some of them and partial scholarships to other deserving student-athletes.

They have received an excellence award from Youth Wave as one of the upcoming youth led organisations.

They have imparted digital skills to 40 young people and have also trained and supplied modern sanitary cups to 92 young girls and 120 girls with reusable sanitary pads to support in the Keeping Girls in School programme.

Additionally, 12 children from the Match Foundation have so far won in regional tournaments just after a year of learning the game.

Through the mentorship in schools’ programme, the Match Foundation has mentored 360 students.

Born 21 March 1990 at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital in Blantyre Tadala and her three older brothers, Tisungeni, Justin and Ronald were raised in a Christian home by a single mother.

“She made us believe in our dreams and spoke positive things about us all the time. My family was and still is very close. My brothers were my closest friends. Growing up in a home where three meals a day was sometimes a farfetched dream, we held our heads up all the time and laughed about it, but prayer was something we relied on. And here we are now as graduates leading in different areas of work life,” says Tadala, an ambassador in Girls Speed Mentoring with the US embassy.

Married to former national basketball champion Vincent Mbeule Ngosi, the last born of four children went to Our Lady of Wisdom Secondary School.

She was later selected to pursue a Bachelor of Arts, Media for Development at Chancellor College where she graduated in 2011.

She went into teaching for three years at Royal Heritage Academy after that. In 2015, she proceeded to further her studies in the United States of America (USA) through a tennis scholarship where she graduated in 2017 with Magna Cum Laude university honours in Business Management with concentration in social entrepreneurship.

She worked as a sponsorship and development intern during her studies at Southern Wesleyan University, in the USA.

Upon her return four years later, she worked as an adjunct lecturer and career service coordinator at African Bible College.