MSL Tennis: Labor of Love for Gumz Ends After 50 Years at Rolling Meadows
Jim Gumz never figured his high school coaching career would reach Love-50.
Hitting 50 years of coaching at Rolling Meadows was not part of the game plan. Nor was doing it in tennis since Gumz was successful in the “traditional three” sports of football, basketball and baseball in high school at Prospect.
Gumz had dabbled in tennis a bit growing up and started to play more as a student at Illinois State University. When he got to Meadows in the fall of 1973, tennis was where the school needed an assistant coach. Gumz took the job and the rest is a historic impact not only on the school but also the Mid-Suburban League and the state.
And now the coaching chapter that started in the early 1970s has come to a close.
“I wouldn’t have stayed in it as long as I did if you didn’t have great kids, coaches, teachers, administrators - all those relationships,” Gumz said. “That’s really what kept me in it.”
Gumz was part of the population explosion of the northwest suburbs and the evolution of the Mid-Suburban League since its beginning in 1963. He was a Prospect teammate of future Major League Baseball players Dave Kingman and Tom Lundstedt and kept the Meadows basketball scorebook as Max Christie, who just finished his rookie year with the Los Angeles Lakers, accumulated an MSL record for points.
“He’s a special person,” said Meadows athletic director Jim Voyles. “They don’t make educators/coaches like him anymore.”
The Formative Years
Jim Gumz was in the first grade when his family moved from St. Louis to Arlington Heights in 1957. He was set to attend high school at Arlington when his dad’s job transferred him to Pittsburgh. They lived there for only a year but it would be instrumental toward Jim’s career path.
“One of the coaches who really influenced me was my freshman coach at Bethel Park who was a social science teacher and basketball coach,” Gumz said. “He had a very calm demeanor and was more of a teacher than an instructor.”
Gumz’ dad got a job promotion and returned to the Chicago area, but there were no houses for sale in the Arlington boundaries, so he ended up attending Prospect. Gumz said that kind of movement wasn’t unusual in those days in the growing northwest suburbs. Gumz, George Timson and Dave Williams, who started for the 1968 MSL basketball co-champions, were all originally supposed to go to Arlington.
As a junior, Gumz played alongside Kingman, who hit 442 homers in his 16-year big-league career, and Lundstedt, who caught for the Cubs and Twins from 1973-75. Gumz was part of two memorable games featuring Kingman.
In the 1967 District championship, Prospect lost 1-0 to St. Viator in a 13-inning game played over three days as it was suspended because of darkness and delayed by rain. Kingman had 21 strikeouts when he lost with two outs in the 13th. Viator’s duo of future minor-league pitchers Bob Stevens and Jerry Donahue combined for 27 strikeouts.
“Oh my lord, I struck out 6 times in that game,” Gumz said with a laugh.
In those days, teams still finished their league schedules after they were eliminated from state tournament play. In Kingman’s final game he hit 3 homers at Prospect and the Daily Herald’s legendary prep writer Keith Reinhard wrote, “it was picked up by a motorist as it rolled up Highland Avenue near Fairview, over 600 feet away from the launch pad.”
“I was like, ‘What was that,’” Gumz recalled with amazement.
Gumz played for Lloyd Meyer’s Arlington American Legion powerhouse with Kingman, Lundstedt, Wheeling three-sport star and future minor leaguer Jack Bastable and future New York Yankees executive Mark Newman. One of their local Legion opponents was another big name with big-league power in Greg “The Bull” Luzinski.
As a senior, Gumz started at guard in basketball and scored a team-high 12 points in a 56-48 loss to eventual 1968 state champion Evanston. He also went up against future standout NFL defensive lineman Dave Butz, who passed away in November, in a regional championship game loss to Maine South.
Gumz said he liked all the coaches he played for - Don Williams in football, Dick Kinneman in basketball and Larry Pohlman in baseball at Prospect and Meyer in Legion ball - and that’s why he got into the profession. But a memorable moment during the basketball season, where Prospect and Wheeling shared the MSL crown with 13-1 records, showed the impact Kinneman had on Gumz.
“We beat Wheeling there and they always pressed, the gym was packed and it was always hot,” Gumz laughed about suspicions the thermostat may have been turned up a bit. “The middle of the next week (Kinneman) sent a Christmas card congratulating us and it was really neat.
“He was very organized and very straight-forward with you. He wasn’t a screamer or yeller and I’m not that way, either. He was a real pleasure to play for and just a lot of fun. He was always fair and gave you a chance and you knew where you stood.”
Gumz went to Illinois State and played freshman baseball. The varsity team, led by future big-league pitcher Buzz Capra, won the NCAA (small) College Division title and Gumz said the program’s jump to the Division I level saw an influx of recruits and the end of his baseball career.
A whole new ballgame awaited.
Tennis Anyone?
Grabbing a tennis racket was not totally unfamiliar to Gumz. His parents played when he was young and he took some lessons with the Arlington Heights Park District in grade school. But baseball took precedence over tennis in high school since they are in the same season.
After he was done with baseball at ISU, he started playing more tennis with friends and was hooked. But his entry into teaching and coaching after he graduated in 1972 was delayed because his Vietnam War draft status was No. 13, so he joined the reserves and entered basic training in September. After a teaching stint for the final few months of the 1972-73 school year at Dundee Middle School, Gumz got a job as a social science teacher at Meadows.
“It was an opportunity to teach where I grew up,” Gumz said. “I never thought that would necessarily happen because you took a teaching job where it was available.”
The same turned out to be true for coaching since there were no openings in the basketball and baseball programs. Athletic director Tom O’Driscoll hired Gumz to assist Neal Peterson in boys tennis.
“Peterson was a really good guy who really knew tennis and was a modest guy,” Gumz said of the former player at Rock Island High School and Augustana College. “He really mentored me and brought me along and took a chance on me when I was young. I learned a lot about how to coach kids and teach kids.”
Gumz would get the chance to coach basketball at the freshman and JV levels for 14 years. But he poured himself into tennis by reading as much as he could about the sport, absorbing as much information as possible at clinics and picking the brains of coaches he worked with at the Wisconsin-Whitewater summer program.
Gumz took over the boys program in 1979 when Peterson stepped aside to spend more time with his kids and family. A year later, the Mustangs took second in the MSL South and won a District title to advance to the state tournament. Doug Weber finished fifth in the state in singles in 1982.
Then Gumz took over the girls tennis program in 1983. When he became Meadows’ girls sports coordinator in 1990-91, he had to give up coaching the boys but continued to coach the girls. The 1992 team led by Jen Limjoco pulled off two firsts by beating powerhouse Barrington and winning the MSL South title.
“There are a whole bunch of factors and I enjoy the sport, enjoy the people and the coaches are great people who are in it for the right reasons,” Gumz said of sticking with tennis. “Peterson was a great guy who taught me a lot about how to coach tennis and coach kids and we had some really good kids come in. We had a lot of support from administrators and teachers.
“Tennis is kind of a unique thing that’s really interesting to me. You have the individual aspect where you’re on your own out there. You instill in kids it’s your responsibility and you’re not one cog with eight or nine other baseball players. And as a coach you have to draw these kids together and make them a team and make them understand what they do on the court does make a difference for the whole team. It’s a great character-builder because there are no referees or umpires. You make your own calls so there’s a lot of personal integrity and honesty involved.”
Gumz’ involvement in the sport expanded well beyond Meadows. He started an eight-team girls tourney with a sectional-type format in late September/early October. He helped with Prospect’s 16-team and Hersey’s 32-team tourneys. The late and legendary Tom Pitchford, who coached at Arlington and Hersey, got Gumz to assist with the state tournaments that are a fixture in the northwest suburbs.
“There’s a lot of hard work with the state tournament but it’s definitely worthwhile and it’s great for our area to continue to have that here,” Gumz said. “I was on the state seeding committee for years with Hinsdale Central’s Jay Kramer and Deerfield’s Chuck Morrison. You would also learn things from them about tennis.
“Pitchford was the father of the state tennis tourney here with all the courts up here. It was at U of I before and some of the courts weren’t in the greatest condition. He got it up here and had it all in the MSL.”
Game, Set and Match
Tennis also became a family affair for Gumz, his wife Wendy and their kids Shelby and Alex at Fremd. When he retired as the girls’ AD in 2008, he started coaching the boys again and continued to lead the girls program. But Gumz wasn’t looking at round-number milestones.
“There was no plan to be there 50 years total,” said Gumz, who was inducted into the Illinois High School Tennis Coaches Association Hall of Fame in 2008.
Then 2020 rolled around and COVID affected plans as it did for everyone. In Gumz’ case, his plan to step aside that season changed because he didn’t want to leave the program in a tough spot. He came back as head coach in 2021 and that was going to be it, but when both assistant coaches stepped away, Bruce Wedell agreed to take over the girls program as long as Gumz agreed to stay on as his assistant for one more year.
Gumz said this boys season was interesting because 7 of the 11 players on the JV team were new to high school tennis. But Gumz accepted the challenge along with the many others he’s seen as the coaching profession evolved the last 50 years.
“There are still a lot of similarities and when kids come out for sports like tennis, they like to be part of an activity and like to learn and like to get better,” Gumz said. “The biggest difference, and it’s neither good nor bad, is when I first started coaching if you said something to a kid that was it.
“Now there is more questioning about it. Why are we doing this? Why do I have to do this? And it’s not good or bad, it’s just different. Some of the coaches early on were good guys but they didn’t tolerate any questioning of what you were doing. Now you have to be more encouraging of kids, I believe, and that’s not a bad thing.”
It’s also a good thing Gumz will continue to be involved in helping with the state and Meadows’ tennis tournaments and keeping the book for boys and girls basketball. But now he and Wendy, who is fully retired, will have more time to travel and see more of Alex, a software engineer in Boulder, Colorado, and Shelby, a corporate buyer for US Foods who lives in Elgin, and their families.
“I never thought I would do it for 50 years,” Gumz said. “I thought eventually down the road as I got married I’d step aside. I had a lot of success with the team and my wife said, ‘You like it so keep doing it.’ The kids loved it and could come and hit after practice so I stayed with it.”