Sujay Lama ’92 comes from tennis royalty in Nepal. After an extraordinary playing career, he went on to become a stellar coach, turning average teams into title winners and piling on coach-of-the-year honors. But a promise to his mother when he left his homeland nearly 27 years ago gave rise to a philanthropic endeavor that’s become as important to him as coaching—and that’s raised more than $35,000 for schoolchildren in Nepal.
The family game
Lama’s father was a pioneer of tennis in Nepal. He’d grown up in Burma, a British colony where tennis was popular. When he returned to Nepal and realized that only expatriots were playing the sport, he built five tennis courts. “So everybody in my family started playing, and they all became national champions,” Lama recalls. “And so I said, I better be a tennis player too!”
After graduating in tenth grade from his boarding school in Darjeeling, India, he trained with a brother in Germany. Two years later, Lama ranked in the top 50 juniors in the world, but a knee injury the day before he was to leave for Wimbledon Juniors made him reevaluate. “I thought, I better have a backup plan,” he says.
He enrolled in a second high school, for expats in Kathmandu, and one day his guidance counselor gave him a giant Peterson’s guide to U.S. colleges. While he was combing through the tome, he got word that a Dennis Johnson ’71 from Luther College was meeting prospective students at the Himalaya Hotel. “I remember him showing me the pictures of Luther, and I thought, That’s got to be one of the prettiest campuses in America. Obviously he didn’t show me the pictures of snow,” Lama jokes.
While a Luther student, Lama won the Iowa Conference tennis singles and doubles titles and earned MVP all four years, being named All-American twice (he has since been inducted into Luther’s Athletic Hall of Fame). He also competed for Nepal in the 1990 Asian Games in Beijing (he was able to complete an independent study on the aftermath of Tiananmen Square in China while he was there). And he met his future wife, Lynne Tan-Lama ’90, a student from Malaysia with whom he has two children, Priya (15) and Siddhartha (10).
From player to coach
The Lamas have been living in the United States for more than two decades, and Sujay has built an incredible coaching career. In his current post, at the University of North Texas, he took the Mean Green from last in the Sun Belt to first in just four seasons, becoming the program’s winningest coach in the process. As assistant coach at the University of Florida, his teams won four national titles and had three undefeated seasons. As head coach at the University of Illinois, he took the team from 75th to 16th in the country and second in the Big Ten.
“I’ve been very competitive, and I love setting goals,” Lama says. “And the beauty of being in a college environment is that every year you set a new goal.”
What Lama loves most about coaching tennis is mentoring student-athletes. “I’m really proud that my kids really have a great bond with me. That love and respect is very important, that connection is important. I try to connect every day, because if I’m connected, I can do a lot of good things.”
A promise to give back
“My mom was a very wise lady,” Lama says. “When I left Nepal, she saw the writing on the wall: this kid is going to go, and he won’t be coming back. And she made me promise not to forget my motherland. To give back. So since day one, I’ve been always thinking What can I do? What can I do? What can I do? But you get busy with tennis, trying to start a career, and moving up the ladder, and then you feel guilty, and it gets bigger and bigger until it’s overwhelming.”
But in 2003, after his mother passed away, Lama returned to Nepal to visit his father and sister, who had converted part of their house into a school that taught both paying students and five full-scholarship orphans.
“I kind of gravitated to those orphaned kids. They were so happy—this was the highlight of their day, coming to school and learning. I used to go for my morning runs, and I would see them walking, about five miles from the orphanage to school. One day, they were all walking holding hands, and they all stopped at once and said together, ‘Good mooorrrrrning, sir.’ And that was the defining moment of my life. I thought, You better do something now.”
Lama returned to the U.S. still thinking about the kids. He asked his sister how much it would cost to sponsor one—just $200. Incredulous, he shared this with his assistant coach, JoAnne Russell (now a Project Nepal board member), who agreed straightaway to sponsor one. From there, funding fell into place like dominoes, with brothers and sisters and friends of friends all offering to sponsor a Nepalese student.
Lama asked friend Ed Kellerman, a senior lecturer in communications with a background in education administration at the University of Florida, to help with the budding organization. In 2008, Kellerman, now codirector of Project Nepal, won a course development grant from UF’s Bob Graham Center for Public Service. He used it to evaluate the Lamas’ Nabha Deepti school in Kathmandu, where he found “strong leadership, committed teachers, and 72 students passing their exams.”
Lama’s father is now 85 and his sister is legally blind, and in 2011 the Nabha Deepti school closed its doors. Project Nepal is now allocating $500 a year to hire a third teacher for 200 students at the Bhairabnath Primary School in the Kudari district, and they also partner with Radha Paudel’s Action Works of Nepal charity.
Lama, skeptical of charity organizations with which he has no firsthand experience, convinced Kellerman to scout out Action Works in person with him by traveling to the Sunnigaum district in the Karnali region of western Nepal. “We flew to Kathmandu, took two different flights, then a jeep that broke down, then an old bus, then hiked for a couple of hours to this remote part of western Nepal,” he says. “Radha is the most dynamic lady I ever met in my life, she is like Mother Theresa. And she’s doing work with education, nursing, healthcare, fighting chaupadi [a traditional practice that isolates menstruating women], and the school she is working with was fascinating for us. So we decided to focus on the education aspect and help rebuild schools and get teachers and books there. It’s such a good feeling to know from my end that our funds are going in the right direction and impacting lives out there.”
“In life,” Lama says, “you need two ingredients. One is passion. I have passion for life, for my kids, for my work. I already have that. And you need a mission, something bigger than yourself. This—Project Nepal—has become my mission. When you have mission, there’s something that you’ll leave behind, a legacy. That’s what keeps me going.”
Learn more about Project Nepal atsupportprojectnepal.com.