The coach behind MAH
Coach Chris
Mah Agustin
A player’s view of the rally.
A coach’s attention to the individual.
Chris helps volleyball athletes connect what they read, how they move and what they make possible for the next player.
Libero, defense and first contact are central to his work. His coaching also reaches setters, outside hitters, middles and opposites—connecting each athlete’s responsibilities to the rally around them.
MAH Volleyball Training · Sacramento & online
01 / The playing perspective
Learning the game from
more than one position.
Chris began learning volleyball at around ten in an adult playing environment connected to his family and church community. The game was part of his life before it became a coaching career.
His early playing background included outside hitting. By fifteen, he was playing in Adult Open competition, and he competed at Junior Olympics in 1996. His development later included setting responsibilities and libero play.
Those different responsibilities gave him different views of the same rally. Today, he draws on more than thirty years of playing and coaching to help athletes understand how one contact changes the next.
A hitter’s view
Attacking drew his attention to how defenders organized themselves and what they were trying to take away.
Setting responsibilities
Learning to set connected first contact with space, tempo and the options available to an attacker.
A libero’s view
Libero play sharpened his attention to the information available before an attack and the movement it called for.
02 / The people and environments
Early exposure.
Later, a direct coaching relationship.
From approximately age twelve through sixteen, Chris repeatedly attended Marv Dunphy’s volleyball camps at Pepperdine. Dunphy took a personal interest in Chris when he was about twelve, and Chris continued returning to the Pepperdine camp environment through his formative years. That personal connection belongs to several formative years of returning to the camp environment.
Rick McLaughlin was part of those earlier Pepperdine camp years. Later, he became Chris’s college coach. Chris credits Rick with a lasting emphasis on fundamentals.
Chris’s playing development also included direct coaching from Ruben Volta. His perspective grew across these coaching environments and through his own experience playing and teaching the game.
03 / Becoming a coach
Learn the athlete.
Then choose
the work.
Coaching since July 1999
Chris began coaching in July 1999. Today, that work continues through MAH Volleyball Training: private and small-group training, team development, clinics, technical education and film study.
Years of developing athletes have made the individual central to his approach. A useful natural strength should be understood before a change is prescribed. Two athletes can produce a similar result and need different work.
His coaching connects serve receive and floor defense with setting, attacking, transition and the relationship between the block and the defenders behind it. The athlete’s position shapes the problem; the rally gives it context.
The question guiding the work is practical: what should this athlete develop first, and how will that work transfer into the game?
04 / How Chris studies the rally
Look at the result.
Study how it happened.
When a pass misses its intended window, Chris studies the sequence around it: what the athlete could see, when movement began, how the athlete arrived and what options remained at contact.
Sometimes the contact itself needs work. Sometimes an earlier reading or movement limitation leaves the athlete with fewer choices. The evidence determines the priority.
THE MAH SYSTEM gives that work a consistent structure. Chris identifies a meaningful, controllable priority, builds from the athlete’s strengths and reassesses whether the training appears in the rally.
05 / The work today
Bring that perspective
to your development.
Chris’s public teaching begins with relationships athletes can use: reading the play, arriving with control and creating options for a teammate. Directional Passing carries that approach into a structured, self-guided path using controlled partner-fed practice.
For an athlete’s own game, Film Review provides individualized diagnosis and a development priority. Remote Coaching connects individualized online development with practice, feedback and reassessment. They are separate services, selected around the support the athlete needs.
In Sacramento, Live Training brings Chris’s coaching directly to the court through private and small-group sessions across positions.