The Mercyhurst Lakers are college basketball’s newest Division I program, and they have spent their first two years at the top level doing something new arrivals are not supposed to do: winning conference games. In Erie, Pennsylvania, on Owen McCormick Court, head coach Gary Manchel — the school’s all-time winningest coach, now in his 25th season — has taken a Division II powerhouse, dragged it up a division, and refused to let it act like an underdog.
The numbers tell the story of a transition done right. In 2024-25, Mercyhurst’s first Division I season, the Lakers went 15-16 overall but 9-7 in the Northeast Conference — a winning league record in year one at the new level, good for third place, stunning just about everyone who had penciled them in for a long rebuild. In 2025-26 they did it again: 17-17 overall, 10-8 in the NEC, tied for third. Back-to-back winning conference records while still in the reclassification window. In the modern era of realignment, that is about as good as a D-I debut gets.
This was no accident and no fluke. Before the jump, Mercyhurst was one of the premier Division II programs in the country — seven NCAA tournament appearances, an Elite Eight run in 2018-19, and back-to-back 25-win seasons in 2021-22 and 2022-23. Manchel built that machine on defense: for two decades he has been regarded as one of the best defensive coaches in small-college basketball, the kind of coach whose teams make opponents miserable for forty minutes. The surprise of the D-I move wasn’t that the defense traveled. It was that the Lakers could score enough to win in the NEC — and they could.
Manchel himself is the constant. Hired in the early 2000s, he has now guided the program across three different conferences and piled up more than 400 wins at the school (536 for his career), a total that makes him Mercyhurst’s all-time wins leader by a wide margin. He took the Lakers to their first-ever NCAA tournament, and he did it seven times at the D-II level. When the school decided to bet on Division I, there was never a question about who would lead the climb.
The home floor has been the foundation. Owen McCormick Court, inside the Mercyhurst Athletic Center, is the kind of tight, loud gym where visiting teams feel the walls closing in. In that first D-I season the Lakers dropped only two games at home all year — a fortress record that announced the program belonged. Erie is a real basketball town, and the community has embraced the D-I era with the hunger of a fan base that waited decades for this stage.
The 2025-26 campaign showed both the progress and the distance left to travel. The nonconference schedule was fearless to the point of audacity: at Northwestern to open the season, a 73-65 win at Loyola Chicago, trips to Syracuse and West Virginia, a first-ever meeting with Miami (Ohio) in Oxford. Those are guarantee-game gauntlets that would break a young program’s spirit; Mercyhurst treated them as tuition and came out tougher. In NEC play the Lakers went toe-to-toe with a league topped by LIU’s 24-win juggernaut and a strong Central Connecticut side, finishing in a tie for third with Le Moyne at 10-8.
The identity is unmistakable: defense first, toughness always, and a half-court discipline that frustrates teams built on tempo. Manchel’s teams have always been greater than the sum of their parts — the system is the star, the rotations are crisp, and the effort level never wavers. In an NEC full of programs trying to out-talent each other, Mercyhurst tries to out-execute everyone, and for two straight years it has worked.
The 2026-27 season is year three of the climb, and the goals are sharpening. The Lakers are still in the NCAA reclassification window — full tournament eligibility arrives down the road — which makes the NEC tournament the realistic prize and the measuring stick. A third straight winning league record would cement Mercyhurst as a permanent NEC factor rather than a transition novelty. The roster math of the portal era hits transitioning programs hard, but Manchel’s quarter-century of program-building is exactly the kind of stability that keeps a core together.
There is a bigger story here, too, about what it means to climb divisions in the 2020s. The portal was supposed to make life impossible for programs like Mercyhurst — the big schools would simply poach their best players every spring. Instead, the Lakers have shown that culture, continuity and a Hall-of-Fame-caliber coach still matter. Players want to be developed. They want to win. Manchel offers both, in a program where everyone knows the standard because the standard has been the same for 25 years.
Watch the NEC race this winter and you will find Mercyhurst right in the thick of it — defending, grinding, winning the games a second-year D-I program has no business winning. The Lakers are not new anymore. They are just good. And in Erie, Pennsylvania, that was the plan all along.