Martin Ayin enters his 22nd season as head volleyball coach for the Falcons, the longest-tenured coach in the program’s history. He took a struggling program of only five remaining players back in 2004, and he has turned it into a conference championship team that has 37 women in the program. He was also responsible for the re-emergence of the junior varsity program at Friends University which has been the biggest junior varsity program in the KCAC in the last half-decade.
Last season saw the Falcons make a significant stride under Ayin and improve their win total by seven.
Ayin has coached a trio of All-KCAC selections in three of the past five seasons, including KCAC Player of the Year and NAIA All-America performer Sarah Lazar. Last season, Sydney Lentz earned first-team All-KCAC honors under Ayin.
Academics has always been a high priority under Ayin, as the Falcons recently paced the entire KCAC with 11 NAIA-Daktronics Scholar-Athlete recipients.
In 2019, Ayin guided the Falcons to a winning record 22-21 and the program's first KCAC postseason tournament semifinal berth since the 2015 season.
Now that Coach Ayin has achieved his initial goal of getting the program to qualify for the national tournament, he has new goals, and new expectations. He wants his program to learn how to build on the tradition of success. They started to strive to be a championship team every single year, one in which “Tradition Never Graduates.”
The Falcons have had four seasons with 25 plus wins and a season with 30 plus wins along with an 18-0 conference record in the last eight years.
Prior to accepting this position at Friends University, Coach Ayin spent two seasons as an assistant men’s volleyball coach at Newman University where he also worked as the recruiting coordinator. In his last year as an assistant at Newman, he helped lead them to the NAIA national title game in which they hosted and finished as national runner-up.
Before pursuing his coaching career, he was a defensive specialist at Marycrest International University in Davenport, Iowa for his first three years of school. He helped the team qualify for nationals each year, culminating in a national runner-up finish in 2001. For his senior year, Ayin transferred to Newman University for his Sociology degree and he was the starting libero for their volleyball team. Ayin led both teams in defense and placed in many defensive statistical categories at the national level.
Before his college coaching career, Ayin coached the junior varsity volleyball team at Rose Hill High School in 2003 to a record of 19-5 and he helped the varsity team to a runner-up finish at the sub-state finals.
In addition to Coach Ayin's coaching at Friends University, he became a well-known club coach in the Wichita area as he started the Redline Volleyball Club in 2005. The mission of the club was to give area volleyball players at the middle school and high school level an opportunity to play and get better and get exposure for the next level. Ayin believed in giving these young people a chance to play games like any other club but he also believes in the individual coaching of each member so they are getting prepared properly to play. The Redline Volleyball Club became a formidable club in the Heart of America region. 90 percent of his club members went on to play in college, with over 30 competing here at Friends.
Coach Ayin has also recently coached the ICT MAVS and the Wichita Shockwave Volleyball Academy.
In February of 2013 Coach Ayin was inducted into the Newman University Athletic Hall of Fame as a member of the coaching staff on the 2004 men’s volleyball team that finished runner-up in the 2004 NAIA-Tachikara Men's National Championship.
Coach Ayin’s lifetime record at Friends University is 358-370, along with a KCAC record of 199-157, a KCAC playoff Record of 13-13. The Falcons have also captured two KCAC Tournament Championships, one KCAC Regular Season Championship, and a pair of NAIA National Tournament berth under Ayin's leadership.
Ayin resides in Wichita with his wife Anna and their sons Alex and Jack-Martin.
