'Best college player in Indiana' may not be where you expect to find him

MARION – It is halftime on a Tuesday night in the Crossroads League. Outside of the home team locker room, Indiana Wesleyan coach Greg Tonagel and his staff of Jeff Clark, David Osborn and Hudson Welty go over a few key points to share with the team in a two-point game against rival St. Francis.

Inside, the players pass around a halftime snack — a bag of Haribo sour gold bears. Kyle Mangas grabs a few from the bag. In past seasons, he might have stayed quiet and let others do the talking. But Mangas remembers two years earlier when he was a freshman and seniors Jacob Johnson and Ben Carlson pulled him aside and asked him to be more of a vocal leader. If the team was going to maximize its potential, it was necessary.

Two lockers down from Mangas is freshman Spencer Piercefield. He is quiet, silently stewing over a 0-for-3 first half. Mangas sees himself in Piercefield. “We need that look,” Mangas tells Piercefield, “like you know you are going to knock them down.”

Piercefield tells this story in the locker room with a wide smile after the game. In the second half, the freshman from Center Grove hits both of his 3-point attempts, including one on an assist from Mangas when he was double-teamed in the post late in the second half that sparked a rally on the way to a 97-82 win.

“After the game he said, ‘That’s the look we need,’” Piercefield said. “It’s big someone like him, the best player on the team, says that to a freshman.”

That is the way it works around here. Pay it forward. For 15 years, Tonagel has quietly built a monster of a college basketball program at Indiana Wesleyan. Three NAIA Division II national titles in the past six years. More than 400 victories. Nine conference titles in the past 13 seasons. The superlatives go on and on.

But even Tonagel, for as successful as the program has been, sometimes has to shake his head and smile at the good fortune to have a player like Kyle Mangas. Tonagel remembers watching Mangas as a senior at Warsaw and sending his staff a group text: “I’m watching the best recruit we’ve ever signed play.”

“Go ahead and laugh now,” Tonagel says in his office before Tuesday’s game, “but I think he deserves a shot in the NBA. It probably won’t be the traditional route. But there’s always a need for somebody who just knows how to play.”

How many Division I programs missed on Mangas? We will never know the answer to that question. He had no offers coming out of high school. Every once in a while, Mangas will watching Big Ten or ACC games on television and wonder. But those are fleeting moments. Playing the comparison game, as tempting as it may be, is not fair to him or Indiana Wesleyan.

But others can. Those who watch him on a game-to-game basis appreciate what they are witnessing.

“I think he is the best college player in Indiana,” says Jim Brunner, the play-by-play radio voice for Indiana Wesleyan. “He’s remarkable. He has the brain of a basketball genius, the way he handles the game.”

The race is not always to the swift. Remember that lesson from “The Tortoise and the Hare”? Not to compare Mangas to a tortoise, but it applies here. Never in a hurry. But after all of the head fakes and bank shots, “Mango” ends up with a smooth 30 points without breaking a sweat. Or at least it looks that way.

“Slow is smooth, smooth is fast,” Mangas says of his philosophy after a 33-point night against St. Francis, his fifth consecutive game of at least 30 points. “I try to keep that in the back of my head — be quick but don’t rush. If you do that, good things will happen.”

'Confidence, not arrogance'

“Mango,” as they call him around here, will break all of the Indiana Wesleyan scoring records. After the St. Francis game, he pulled within two points of third place on the career list with 2,286 points. He trails only Perry Frank (2,452), Durand “Speedy” Walker (2,409) and Lane Mahurin (2,288), but he will set the record out of sight by the end of his senior season.

The numbers are the numbers. Mangas averages 27.8 points per game. He shoots 56% from the field and 40% from the 3-point line (57-for-143). Oh yeah, he also leads the team in assists (4.2 per game) and second behind 7-footer Seth Maxwell in rebounds (6.4).

The statistics are almost boring in their efficiency — from 21.5 points as a freshman to 23.6 as a sophomore to 27.8 as a junior. And keep this in mind: Indiana Wesleyan rarely runs anything specifically for Mangas.

“We may run the fewest sets of anybody in the country,” Tonagel said. “With Kyle, he just knows how to find those spots. He can play within the flow of the game and find those spots. We’ve had very few players like that. Sometimes he will just come out and feel things out in the first half and have seven points. Then he’ll explode for 25 in the second half.”

It rarely feels like an explosion with Mango. More like surgery. The head fakes, pass fakes, bank shots in the lane from straightaway. He works the angles. Tanner Rubio, a senior guard who transferred from Division I Jacksonville University, puts Mangas among the top three players he has played with or against.

“It’s his IQ,” Rubio said. “He knows how to get good shots, inside or on the perimeter. He just has a knack for it like I haven’t seen.”

These qualities come, in part, because Mangas is a basketball sponge. He grew up in Warsaw watching players like Nic Moore lead the team to the Class 4A state championship game in 2010. At that time, Mangas was an undersized sixth-grade point guard, coached by his father, Tim Mangas.

“He held me accountable,” Kyle said. “I’d snap back sometimes, and my mom would have to mediate. But it happens sometimes when your dad is coaching. He started my love of basketball. He’s my biggest supporter.”

Tim and Kyle’s mother, Ann, both played at Wawasee. Tim was a 1,000-point scorer before going on to play at DePauw in college for then-coach Royce Waltman. Kyle’s grandfather, Mike Mangas, played at Union City in the early 1960s. His older brother, Jake, was the quarterback on the football team and played basketball at Warsaw.

Crazy as it may seem now, Mangas remembers a comment from Warsaw coach Doug Ogle when he was a freshman, questioning if he trusted him to make a 3-pointer. It was the right message at the right time.

“It kind of stirred something in me,” Mangas said. “I wanted to become a great shooter.”

He gave up football after his sophomore year and went to work. He stretched out to 6-4 with a 6-9 wingspan, which allowed him to shoot over most defenders. And if not over, around. As a junior, teaming the backcourt with senior Paul Marandet, Mangas averaged 19.4 points and helped the Tigers to a 25-2 record and within one game of the Class 4A state finals, losing by three points to Robert Phinisee and McCutcheon in the semistate.

The next year, Mangas capped a memorable career with a 47-point game in a double-overtime win over East Chicago Central in the regional semifinal. He graduated with 1,450 career points to rank fourth in school history. The day then-Indiana All-Star director Charlie Hall called him to tell him he was a 2017 Indiana All-Star, Mangas' grandfather was waiting for him in the driveway after school with tears in his eyes. Mangas was the kid who grew up reading Hoosier Basketball Magazine and tried to guess who would be on the Indiana All-Star team every year.

“I could never have thought I’d be in that position, to be honest,” Mangas said. “I was so proud for Warsaw to get the recognition.”

By the end of July going into his senior year, Mangas had locked into a commitment to Indiana Wesleyan. He had grown up going to camps there and was familiar with the program and Tonagel. There was interest from Division I and II programs and something could have materialized if he had waited through his senior year to commit.

“I could see there was something different when I came on a visit,” Mangas said. “The players wanted to develop a relationship with me. I knew it was a special place where they were going to push me to grow and not just see me as a statistic.”

That does not mean there were not anxious moments for Tonagel, who admits he was secretly mystified as to why there was so little recruiting buzz around Mangas.

“I was a nervous wreck,” Tonagel said. “I knew we were in a good place with him. After that July, we were still standing. From day one, him and his family wanted the best fit. It wasn’t just the basketball jersey, it was a relational component.”

Still, Tonagel did not see this coming. Mangas was just hoping to crack the regular rotation as a freshman. All he did was rank second in the NAIA in total points scored, earn All-American honors, NAIA tournament most outstanding player and lead Indiana Wesleyan to a national championship.

“When the game is on the line,” Indiana Wesleyan athletic director Mark DeMichael said, “Kyle wants the ball. He’s proof that you can be an assassin on the court and as competitive as anybody and that it can be driven by positive emotion. It is confidence not arrogance.”

Finding his fit

Sure, he wonders. How could he not? He grew up an Indiana fan. People tell him all the time that a scorer as savvy as himself could help a Division I team, potentially one of those in-state Division I teams.

Here is how Mangas answers that question: “It’s kind of hard sometimes because you want to play the comparison game. I’m an IU basketball fan. So I’m watching games sometimes and I’m like, ‘How could I fit out there? How could I help them?’ But I don’t want to fall into that trap because it can play with your mind. I love it at IWU. I wouldn’t change a thing.”

There is more to it than basketball. Tonagel and Clark’s “I Am 3rd” approach — God first, others second and self third — has real substance. Tonagel, an Indiana All-Star in 1998 at LaPorte who played at Valparaiso University, is similar to Mangas in that he is often asked about moving “up” in the coaching world.

“I’m in a dream job,” he said. “A lot of people want to project their own expectations and say, ‘What is the next step you are going up to?’ In coaching, it’s seen as a ladder. What if we could stay someplace and create something that has depth and breadth to it? That is what we’re seeing now. We’re trying to build something that is long lasting, not just with our program but around the state. We want to give back to the game. If all you are ever doing is taking and creating this pedestal to project your own record on, I think you are going to get to the end of your career and say, ‘That was a waste of time.’”

It is funny how things work out. Maybe if Mangas would have waited to commit until after his senior season, a Division I or II program would have offered a scholarship. Maybe he would have accepted. Maybe it would have worked out great.

But look at it from the other direction. Looked at what he would have missed out on playing for Tonagel at Indiana Wesleyan.

“When I wasn’t getting those offers, I had to shut that out because it was taking away some of the joy,” Mangas said. “I really started to focus on where I could grow and be happy. Indiana Wesleyan was that place for me.”

Inside that locker room after the St. Francis game was proof in Spencer Piercefield. Maybe in two years, Piercefield will be that upperclassmen to reach a shy, quiet freshman with just the right words of encouragement. Maybe that does not happen anywhere else if Mangas is not at Indiana Wesleyan, where the seniors did the same for him as a freshman.

It looks from here like Mangas found the perfect place.

Call Star reporter Kyle Neddenriep at (317) 444-6649.

Kyle Mangas superlatives

>> Scored 1,450 points at Warsaw to rank fourth all-time

>> 2017 Indiana All-Star

>> Led Warsaw to 61-17 record in three seasons

>> 2018 and 2019 NAIA first team All-American

>> 2018 and 2019 Crossroads Conference Player of the Year

>> Fourth all-time points at Indiana Wesleyan with 2,286

>> School record for points in a season in 2017-18 (818)

>> Shot 56.6% from field, 40.2% from 3-point line and 78.6 percent from free-throw line at Indiana Wesleyan