A mod manager is not essential. The main thing is to take the mod and put it in... since you don't have Tribes of the East, put it in the game/data folder. The mod should have the .pak extension. If the extension is different, it's probably not the mod itself, but an archive containing it; you need to extract it.
The file I have is .pak. It's just that Tribes of the East isn't available yet. Thank you. :)