‘Relentlessly positive’: Championship basketball coach, Whitfield County native Tony Ingle passes away

Published 10:20 pm Tuesday, January 19, 2021

There are few aspects of collegiate basketball in Dalton that the late Tony Ingle didn’t have his fingerprints on.

He played in Dalton, at what was then known as Dalton Junior College during its original 10-year run as a basketball program, after starring at North Whitfield High School. Then, after several career-building coaching stops, he ended that career where it started, back at the Dalton State College, helping to resurrect a dormant program into a national champion.

Ingle, the Whitfield County native and champion basketball coach, passed away on Monday due to complications from COVID-19. He was 68.

Ingle coached the Roadrunners for the first five seasons after the school restarted the athletic program, retiring in 2018. He compiled a record of 134-33 highlighted by winning the 2015 NAIA national championship. Ingle’s Roadrunners won two Southern States Athletic Conference regular season titles and the conference’s tournament championship in 2017. Ingle was a four-time national coach of the year and coached 44 seasons at various levels.

From his witty one-liners to the bits of imparted life advice to the on-court legacy he left, you don’t have to look far to find the lives Ingle touched.

Alex Ireland, who was Ingle’s successor and current Dalton State head coach, said he owes his coaching career — and much more — to Ingle. Ireland met Ingle at Kennesaw State University before Ingle returned home to Whitfield County to lead DSC’s inaugural season as a four-year program in 2013.

Ingle was head coach at Kennesaw State from 2000 until 2011, where he won an NCAA Division II National Championship in 2004. Ireland would come along later, arriving on campus for the latter portion of Ingle’s tenure in Kennesaw as a team manager looking to break into coaching. He’d later find that shot, largely thanks to Ingle again, as an assistant at Dalton State, but he needed something else in college.

“I lost my father in high school,” Ireland said. “Once I got on campus at Kennesaw, he kind of developed into that figure for me. I think you can see that in all the lives he’s touched.”

Ingle had a tendency to do that in his coaching career that also took him to stops as head coach at Alabama-Huntsville and even a stint as the interim coach for 19 games at Brigham Young University during the 1996-1997 season.

He recognized that his responsibility to his players, fellow coaches and team managers was as much to do with lessons on the court as off.

“I never did coach basketball, I coached people,” Ingle said while talking to children at the local Boys & Girls Clubs in March 2019. “I wanted to give back because so much was given to me. What you get is gone when you’re gone, but what you give is your legacy and that lives on.”

He gave a lot for Reed Dungan, who is the all-time leading scorer for Dalton State College. Dungan played for Ingle at Dalton State from 2015 to 2018 — with his last season coming in Ingle’s last at the helm for the Roadrunners — but his connection to the Ingle family goes back much further.

Dungan, a Marietta native, attended one of Ingle’s camps at Kennesaw State as a kid. On that Kennesaw team at the time and at the camp was Israel “Izzy” Ingle, Tony’s son. Ingle had five children, including three sons that would go on to coach basketball at some level.

“That was when I decided I knew I wanted to be a college basketball player,” Dungan said of the camp.

Dungan would get that chance, first with the younger Ingle. Izzy, who’s currently the coach at Timpanogos High School in Orem, Utah, was then the coach at Barnesville’s Gordon State College, where his father had started his collegiate head-coaching career in 1985.

Dungan spent two years at Gordon State, then transferred to Dalton State to play under the older Ingle, where he said he thrived as a player and a person.

“Coach Ingle helped me become a better player, but also a better man,” Dungan said.

Ingle related to the struggles of his players and colleagues through his own struggles in his youth.

An often-told story of Ingle’s featured a necessary dumpster-dive for two differently sized basketball shoes. It’s what he had to do to get a tryout for the team at North Whitfield.

Ingle played his way into a spot in his hometown Dalton Junior College after graduation from North Whitfield, where he played from 1971-1973. He finished his playing career in Montgomery, Alabama, at Huntingdon College. Ingle coached three different Georgia high schools before moving on to the college level.

After his early-career stops, Ingle was an assistant at BYU from 1989 through 1996 prior to taking over the program in an interim role after coach Roger Reid was let go. Ingle finished 0-19 as head man in 1996-97 at BYU and wasn’t retained.

Ingle did some scouting for the NBA’s Utah Jazz and even moonlighted as a standup comedian during a transition period before finding his home back in Georgia at Kennesaw State in 2000.

An Ingle comedic career isn’t a stretch to imagine for Ireland, who shared office space with Ingle while an assistant at Dalton State in 2017 and 2018.

“The microwave was in his office, and there’d be times where I’d have to re-heat my food two or three times because coach was just talking and talking,” Ireland said. “You really experienced every emotion whenever you interacted with him. He’s just a relentlessly positive person.”

Dungan, who is now an assistant coach for Ireland, said Ingle helped inspire that foray into a coaching career path too.

“Just like he instilled in me those lessons, I want to be able to do that too for my players,” Dungan said.

Dungan saw that example when he was in a car accident while at Dalton State in 2016. When Dungan awoke in the hospital for the first time, the first person he saw was Ingle’s smiling face.

Ingle’s faith was another example he tried to provide for his players, Dungan said. In 2017, Ingle began serving in the Dalton ward of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as a bishop. He also made rounds as a motivational speaker later in life. He co-authored an autobiographical book titled “I Don’t Mind Hitting the Bottom, I Just Hate Dragging,” which was released in 2009.

Ireland has been tasked with keeping the winning tradition going that Ingle started at Dalton State as a player, coach and person.

“I’m always very aware of the impact he made,” Ireland said. “I just hope we’re making him proud.”