Sophie Chang will be well-known among her competitors on the ITF World Tennis Tour as a cheerful soul, but the 25-year-old American has more reason than ever for her sunny demeanour.

Chang, who hails from Havre De Grace, Maryland, on USA’s East Coast, won her third professional singles title this weekend at W25 Sumter, adding to her two other ITF tournament wins on home soil at W25 Vero Beach in January and Orlando back in 2018.

She now sits at a career-high No. 270 in the WTA rankings – the latest reward in a career of steady progression, having fluctuated between 300 and 400 in the world for a five-year spell between 2017 and 2021.

A title at the start of the 2022 season delivered the confidence boost Chang needed to kick on to greater heights, and her first W100 quarter-final soon followed in Palm Harbour in April ahead of her first W60 semi-final in Orlando.

Those breakthroughs have provided crucial milestones for a player who has a patient and pragmatic approach to the sport, but savours every step of the journey.

“Being on Tour... it's the ultimate pursuit of mastery of something for me,” Chang explained in a video interview with itftennis.com. “Tennis is a year-round sport and you're just constantly out here looking to better yourself, improve and compete. It's a really cool opportunity to have that and have something that you're always striving for.

“I love playing professional tennis, it's so much more than I guess what a lot of people associate with sport because it becomes so much a part of our lives. It's our career now. My personal growth and my ability to grow as a human being in this career... that's just what I'm so grateful for.”

It might be a job, fundamentally, (and a tough one at that with no guarantee of success) but Chang believes it is important to find a semblance of routine while tackling a career in which every day looks different.

“Tennis is work and life in a way, so I try to create a consistent schedule the best I can,” she said. “You have to be really flexible and things change so much week to week that I try to just make sure that I'm creating some sort of consistency every day.”

That doesn’t mean she doesn’t have lofty ambitions, of course. Chang is confident she’s on the right path to achieve her dreams in the sport – every tournament she tackles presents the chance to change her future.

“When I think ITF [World Tennis] Tour I think of opportunity, because when there are matches and points to be played all of us players have a dream of breaking through to the Top 100 or Top 10 or Top 50 or whatever,” she said. “That's what keeps the dream alive, having these events to play.”