Dartmouth

Ivy League hoopsters are Division I athletes on the court and exceptionally accomplished and eclectic humans off it. Ivy Hoops Online presents the latest edition of our Off the Bench series that takes fans inside the stories that you might not otherwise know from the stands or through your screen.

Shanon Simango ’28  is next in our series. Simango has traveled from a small, close-knit family in Maputo, Mozambique to the Blue Ridge School, and now to Hanover. Basketball and education have given him an extended family that keeps expanding. Now the rising junior is paying it forward, and winning much more than games as his story unfolds.

Shanon Simango thinks Hanover is special.

“It is a small place, you could say, in the middle of nowhere. But it has been so easy for me to find a community there, and not just with my team.”

The feeling of belonging is particularly meaningful when you have traveled clear around the world to find it.

Simango grew up in Mozambique, where he played soccer before anything else.

“I wanted to score the ball,” he recalled, “but they had me playing goalie, so I told my mom, ‘You know what? This is not for me.’”

He tried swimming, competing for a small local club, and considered pursuing it seriously. Then his mother, who had played basketball professionally in Portugal, introduced him to the game she knew best. He had loved watching her play, so he gave basketball a try.

Simango’s mother, Martha Monjane,  never pushed him.

“She’s been like this to this day,” he said, with obvious gratitude. “[Her position was], I’m on your side, no matter what you pick. As long as you love it, I’ll be happy.”

At 13, Simango attended an NBA Academy camp in Senegal, where young players from across the continent practiced and competed. He returned to Mozambique with recruiting film that showed his talent, but not even a passing thought of leaving home. Then a coach suggested he use the film to reach out to schools in the United States.

To begin his search, Simango Googled: “Boarding schools. United States.” The first link was Blue Ridge School in St. George, Va.

Initially, he dismissed it when he saw “all boys.” He laughed because that kind of social environment seemed like a dealbreaker. But he sent the email anyway. Simango said Cade Lemcke, the Blue Ridge basketball coach, “basically changed my life” when he unexpectedly responded.

Simango knew there was no way his family could afford to send him to boarding school overseas. But Lemcke told him the school could help with logistics, visas and finances. In September 2019, he flew on his own to the U.S.

Simango remembers arriving at Washington Dulles International Airport and spotting a man in a Blue Ridge polo: coach Lemcke.

As Simango and his new coach gathered luggage and drove toward the school, Washington, D.C. looked as he had expected: monuments, the Capitol, tall buildings.

When he woke up close to his new school, Simango wondered what had happened to the cityscape. Suddenly, it was “just straight woods.”

And then came a global pandemic.

Thousands of miles from anyone who knew him well, Simango faced isolation, Zoom classes, and a fragmented version of basketball: limited workouts, a few players in the gym at a time, drills on a tennis court, games with masks.

“That first year was kind of rough,” Simango recalled.

There were moments when the distance from home was painful. After their team won a state championship, Simango looked around and saw teammates’ families pouring onto the floor to celebrate.

“My guys were all hugging parents and grandmas,” Simango recounted.

Simango wanted his family, too.

“I was the only dude going back to campus on the bus,” he said.

Simango’s sophomore year, a new door opened when Devin Walker, the team’s point guard, asked Simango, “What are you doing for break?” Told he would just stay on campus, Walker offered, “Why don’t you come home with me?”

Simango never spent another break at Blue Ridge. Devin’s mother, Francoise Burton, and his sisters, Chloe and Carlie Burton, “opened their arms to me like I was one of their own,” Simango remembered.

Breaks no longer made him homesick because, he remembers thinking, “I have a family here now.”

By his senior year, another important person was pushing Simango toward a different version of himself.

Dhruv Mehrotra, a Blue Ridge alumnus who returned as a player development coach, had come to know Simango through the international alumni network. Mehrotra challenged him to back up his ambition with the hard work to match, going with him to the gym early, before chapel.

A few days into the early workouts, Simango nearly opted out. But Mehrotra went to find him.

“He said to my face, ‘You told me you wanted to be great. I am going to help you do that,’” Simango said.

The work changed Simango’s confidence, and eventually his college basketball recruitment.

Simango was excited to be recruited by Liberty.

“I was pretty centered on a place where I could easily grow my faith,” he said.

Dartmouth entered the picture through Lemcke, who connected him with the Big Green coaching staff.

A visit to Hanover looked like it would be a typical recruiting weekend. Arriving in New Hampshire, Simango tried to reach his mother on WhatsApp to share with her what he was experiencing. His messages didn’t go through, so he checked with his brother, Kelsey, to make sure everything was okay at home.

The next morning, he found out why his calls hadn’t gone through. When he went down to breakfast, he found his mom waiting for him in the dining hall.

“Yeah, that got me,” he recalled, still brimming with emotion. “That got me good.”

He had seen his mother only once since leaving Mozambique in 2019 — a nine-day trip home in 2021 to clear his visa.

Simango told then-Dartmouth head coach Dave McLaughlin that he needed to adjust the itinerary for the visit. He wanted to spend time with his mother even more than he wanted to take a campus tour.

The coaches understood how close Simango was to his mom and how much it meant for them to be together after so much time apart. It was icing on the cake when they arranged a translator who could convey the information to her in Portuguese.

He was all in.

Halfway through his college career, Simango is now one of those who makes Dartmouth feel like home for others. He enjoys taking a wide range of classes within and outside of his psychology major. Last summer, he worked in the athletics equipment room, the dining hall, at the library desk and sometimes at the fueling station.

“You couldn’t go a day without seeing me,” Simango said.

A few months into his tenure, new head coach Brett MacConnell gave Simango a nickname that is sticking: “The mayor of Hanover.”

Simango laughs it off. But he knows why it fits.

As an upperclassman, he wants younger teammates to feel comfortable coming to him for help. He intends to do everything he can to be seen in Ivy Madness. With a long-term goal to play professional basketball, Simango is clear on what the sport has given him.

“This game, this ball—it got me across an ocean,” he said. “I’m super-reflective. I rarely get down on myself. I just say, ‘Thank you. Thank you for being able to breathe, get up, be able to play the game.’”

Simango wants to stay in sports beyond his playing days, too, and remain part of teams with an ethos of taking care of each other. He knows that “in this life, like, you cannot do it alone.” He knows that his coach answered a cold email from a teenager in Mozambique. An assistant coach showed up when he didn’t make it to the gym. A teammate’s family opened their home to him.

Those acts of kindness shaped Simango’s first mantra: “If you can help someone, please do.”

Simango worries about his generation’s tendency to curate image over substance, so his second mantra is no surprise: “Just be yourself.”