Donnie Tyndall is currently the Head Basketball coach for the Grand Rapids Drive of the NBA G League. (All ACCESS)

His teams are known for pressing and playing an unconventional match-up zone, a highly successful variation of the defensive system employed by coach Rick Pitino at Louisville.

After graduating from Morehead State University in 1993, Tyndall began coaching at the junior college level. From 1994 to 1996, he was assistant coach at Iowa Central Community College. Tyndall had his first head coaching position in the 1996–97 season at St. Catharine College in Springfield, Kentucky. Tyndall led St. Catharine to a 30–5 record and the school's first-ever NJCAA tournament appearance. In 1997, Tyndall earned NJCAA Region 7 National Coach of the Year and Kentucky Junior College Coach of the Year honors.

After his season at St. Catharine, Tyndall got his first NCAA Division I coaching position as an assistant at LSU under John Brady, a position he would hold from 1997 to 2001.Tyndall helped LSU finish first in the SEC West Division in the 1999–00 season and make the Sweet 16 round of the 2000 NCAA Tournament. This LSU team also featured Stromile Swift, the #2 pick in the 2000 NBA draft.

In the 2001–02 season, Tyndall served as associate head coach at Idaho under Leonard Perry.

From 2002 to 2006, Tyndall was associate head coach at Middle Tennessee under Kermit Davis. Middle Tennessee had winning seasons all four of those seasons.

In his first Division I head coaching job, Tyndall served as head coach at his alma mater Morehead State from 2006 to 2012. Morehead State under Tyndall won the Ohio Valley Conference tournaments of 2009 and 2011 and earned automatic NCAA Tournament bids those years. Morehead State also made the 2010 College Basketball Invitational.

Tyndall was the head coach at the Southern Miss from 2012 to 2014. Southern Miss made the National Invitation Tournament in 2013 and 2014 and finished first in Conference USA standings for the 2013–14 season. Tyndall went 56–17 as head coach at Southern Miss.

On April 22, 2014, Tyndall was hired as head basketball coach at the University of Tennessee, after spending the previous two seasons as the head basketball coach at Southern Miss.

On November 4, 2016, Tyndall was hired by the Toronto Raptors to be an assistant coach on their development team, Raptors 905.Toronto Raptors head coach Dwane Casey was fired in May 2018 and was then hired as the head coach of the Detroit Pistons; Tyndall then took an assistant coaching role with Grand Rapids Drive, the development team for the Pistons. After one season, he was promoted to head coach of the Drive for the 2019–20 season.