A player known for dishing out assists, Viking coach passing out praise after state-title win
Men’s basketball teams at Kinston High School have won seven state titles since 2008 and coach Perry Tyndall has been a part of all of them. The 2026 title won last month was his fourth as the Viking head coach.
Perry Tyndall has a habit of deflecting praise. Winning another state basketball championship last month – Kinston High School’s seventh since 2008 – has made more demands on the coach’s natural modestly.
When the Vikings were recognized for their 3A state men’s title at the most recent meeting of the Lenoir County Board of Education, Superintendent Brent Williams carved out a little time for an individual recognition, praising Tyndall’s success as a coach and teacher and role model for KHS students, calling him a “very special person.”
Tyndall passed the praise along to the players and the coaching staff who stood with him at the meeting. “It’s these guys,” he said of the team, “and the coaches who are up here with me. They deserve just as much credit as I get.”
This year’s Vikings went 22-3, willed their way through the playoffs to win the East Region crown and bested West Region representative Walkertown 80-54 in a contest that was essentially over by halftime.
That win gave Kinston its 12th men’s title – the second most in the state all time – and made Tyndall a seven-time champion at KHS, three as an assistant coach and four as a head coach. It also ended an 11-year drought, silenced the doubters and turned adversity on its head, putting the Vikings back on top after what the head coach calls a “roller-coaster season.”
“I think a lot of people doubted we could do it,” Tyndall said in an interview last week. “That’s what I’m most proud of for this group, how we had to overcome some things. I think they’ll always be able to remember the year they won it all, by doing what they knew they needed to do. I hope that will translate to their later life, that they’ll be able to say, ‘I know what I need to do.’”
Coaching is teaching, of course, but for coaches like Tyndall the lessons aren’t encapsulated in x’s and o’s. “Any teacher has a unique platform, but coaching takes the teaching and the sport and it marries them,” Tyndall said. “You have a unique opportunity to impact a group of people through a sport that you love. You have to understand that it’s not about you as the coach. When you’re given the title of coach, you’re a shepherd and it’s something you should respect.”
If there’s a hint of the scriptural in that perspective, it’s no accident. Tyndall is open about his faith and credits the guiding hand of providence in making him a coach and allowing him to have success in that role.
Growing up in Kinston, he and older brother Webb were immersed in sports. The family passed up summer vacations because the boys were on the baseball field. As a youngster, he attended basketball camp led by legendary coach Paul Jones. From high in the bleachers, Tyndall and his Rochelle Middle School classmates rooted for Webb and a team that included future NBA star Jerry Stackhouse. When Webb moved on to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to play JV ball for two years and walk on to a Dean Smith-coached varsity team, his younger brother found a spot as a role player on a Viking team coached by Craig Hill, counting on gritty defense and passing ability to earn him minutes. Tyndall followed Webb to UNC and graduated in 2002 – but without much of a game plan.
Hill, who was by then Kinston High’s principal, offered him a position as a teacher and JV basketball coach.
“I didn’t even have education and coaching on the radar,” Tyndall remembered. “It was the Lord’s way of saying this is the path you’re going to go.”
He stepped away from Kinston High long enough to earn an additional degree in exercise and sports science at East Carolina University, met requirements for teacher certification and returned to LCPS as a teacher and basketball coach at Rochelle. In the fall of 2006, he was back on the Viking bench as an assistant to Wells Gulledge. Their teams won state titles in 2008, 2010 and 2012.
Tyndall took over as head coach the next year and, behind Brandon Ingram, another future NBA great, won state titles in 2013, 2014 and 2015, making Kinston High the only 2A school ever to earn four consecutive titles. With the championship in March, the 46-year-old Tyndall notched his 306th win and cemented his place atop a list of championship coaches dating back to 1950, when Amos Sexton won at Grainger High, and that includes Gulledge, with his three state titles, and Kinston’s winningest coach, Paul Jones, who won consecutive titles in 1964 and 1965.
While shepherding players, Tyndall is also shepherding a legacy, leading a program where winning it all can feel like an expectation, at a school where men’s basketball is literally the stuff of legend. It is a job done in the spotlight. Family and faith, he says, sustain him.
Lauran, his wife of 19 years, their daughter Ollie, 14, and son Tru, 9, are the core of Tyndall’s support network, he says, and stand “alongside,” not separate from, the rigors required of coaching. “My wife has done a really great job of bringing the family into everything that’s going on,” Tyndall said. “You can’t achieve as a coach and look back and know you did that at the expense of your wife and kids.”
If he counts himself lucky, he also counts himself blessed.
“There’s no way I’m where I am today without the favor and blessing and the doors the Lord has opened for me. It’s nothing that I’ve done well. It’s just been a bunch of great kids who have been willing to go in there and try every year to win. My coaching staff and I are just trying to help them in as many ways as we possibly can, to help them be successful,” Tyndall said.
“For me, the coaching field is a mission.”
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