Exactly a week after the Tennessee job opened, Donnie Tyndall was officially announced as Tennessee’s new head coach. Tyndall was contacted late last week by representatives from UT and told he would be getting a call from Dave Hart “soon.”

He waited.

And waited.

And waited on Tennessee to call over the weekend.

When LA Tech’s Mike White was offered the job, I reached out to Tyndall through a source to let him know I didn’t think White would take the job. Tyndall kept waiting and when Dave Hart came calling Monday evening, he jumped at the opportunity to don the Orange and White.

Though he eventually ended up in Knoxville, he took a winding road to get there.

Born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Donnie Tyndall (43) grew up in a blue collar home. His parents divorced when he was young and he credits both his mother, Judy, and his stepfather, Dave Lightfoot, for demonstrating the type of work ethic it takes to be successful in the basketball world.

Judy and Dave were both educators who worked hard to make a difference in the lives of those in the community. “My mom was a teacher, then a principal. My dad (Dave) was a teacher, principal and superintendent of schools,” Tyndall said in an interview in Hattiesburg last year. “My parents were very educated, goal oriented people. My mom in particular was as hard-working individual as I’ve ever seen. I remember as a young boy, she was finishing up her degree at night. She was driving back and forth on some bad winter nights that you have in Michigan and she went on to work on her master’s so she could be a principal while working at a small private school. She was making $6,500 a year working at school, raising two kids and trying to go to school to be a principal.”

“Her work ethic, driven to achieve her goals, certainly helped me, even as a young boy, engrain work ethic into my mind and when you put your mind to something making it happen.”

When he was in fourth grade, he spent time as the water boy for his school’s middle school team. One day his coach decided to reward all his diligence and let him dress out for a game. His team got a lead and Tyndall got to go in the game. From that point forward, he knew he wanted a career in hoops.

“I never drank and never smoked because basketball was going to be my way out. I was a gym rat. All I ever wanted to do was be a pro basketball player. But my genes limited me…Once I finally figured out my sophomore or junior year of college that I wasn’t going pro, there was no other direction my life was going to take other than to be a basketball coach,” Tyndall said.

After playing at Morehead State, he immediately got a job as an assistant at Iowa Central Community College at the age of 24. After a couple years there, he took a head coaching job at St. Catharine, a small NAIA level college in Springfield, Kentucky. In his lone season leading them, they went 30-5. That experience got him a job as an assistant at LSU at the young age of 27. He was there for four years before jumping to Idaho (01-02) and Middle Tennessee State (02-06). His reputation as a bright young mind and relentless worker and recruiter landed him the head coaching job at his alma mater, Morehead State.

There, he took a program that finished 4-23 to a 12-18 record in year one. In six years at Morehead State, he took them to two NCAA tournaments and won 20 games three times—Morehead State won 20 games just twice in program history prior to his arrival. His historic success at Morehead State was duplicated at Southern Miss. Tyndall’s two years in Hattiesburg saw the Golden Eagles win a school-record 56 games. Southern Miss narrowly missed the NCAA Tournament the last two seasons despite an RPI no worse than 34th both years. For perspective, in Martin’s three year tenure Tennessee’s best RPI at season’s end was 40th.

His success has not been limited to the court. “Education has always been at the forefront of everything I’ve done and I’ve certainly tried to engrain that into my teams,” Tyndall said. “I believe in the student-athlete, obviously the emphasis there on student…In my eight years of as a head coach, at the end of this May, I will have graduated 21 or my 22 seniors. So when I say the word or the term student-athlete it is not just lip service. Our kids will go to class, they will be on time, they will value an education and they will leave the University of Tennessee with a degree in hand. I can assure you that.”

“Our guys will handle themselves in the community in a first class manner. We are not going to have thugs, we are not going to have renegades as part of our program. It won’t happen on my watch. Will we have perfect angels? I doubt it. I am not a perfect angel. But we are going to have people who are prideful to wear the Tennessee uniform and want to represent our university the exact right way.”

In Donnie Tyndall, the Vols have a coach with a proven track record of success both on the court, in the classroom and in the community. Tennessee also has a coach who’s had his eye on the Vol head coaching job for some time.

“Tennessee to me is a destination job,” Tyndall said. “I know that is going to vary year-to-year, but arguably it is one of the better conferences in the country year in and year out. I think it is a place that is my network of recruiting-wise, in the southeast, the states I have recruited for 15 years. I have the network and the relationships to be able to get quality players each and every year. I just think, again, the fan base, the passion that our fans have, when you can get 18,000 to 20,000 fans in the gym every night, that is appealing.”

Sources during Tennessee’s search indicated Tyndall wanted the job before it ever came open and a story he told Tennessee athletic director Dave Hart, and then the media, backed that up.

“I showed Dave yesterday at the interview, my youngest daughter Grace, she’s 11, if you’ve seen my two daughters throughout my coaching career, a lot of times they sit on the end of the bench,” Tyndall said.

“In fact, a few years ago in the NCAA tournament Erin Andrews interviewed my oldest daughter, they’re like those girls in the movie Remember the Titans; they live and breathe it now. So we’re at the Final Four, Nikki and I and the girls are with us and Tulsa calls on Saturday morning and their athletic director and the search firm wanted to meet with me, so I got dressed and told the girls I was going to meet with them and went down and did the interview.”

“I got back and the girls asked `what do you think daddy, what do you think?’ and I said `well, I don’t think that’s the right spot for daddy.’ They said `why not, they’re in UCONN’s conference, that’s the big conference and so I told them that I thought something maybe down the road would be a little bit better fit for your dad, that maybe the Tennessee job would open up because at the time Cuonzo was rumored to be going to Marquette.”

“So obviously that didn’t transpire and then about a week later I got a text from my daughter Grace and I showed it to Dave, she text me and it said in capital letters, THE TENNESSEE JOB IS OPEN HINT HINT so you never hope that a guy leaves but this was a job that was on my radar, and Grace’s too.”

Vol fans owe Grace Tyndall a heartfelt “Thank you.”

The Vols have a coach.

He’s a proven winner and a dynamic personality.

Tennessee is the perfect fit for him, and he just might be the perfect fit for Tennessee.