Honda Center, a Grey Tarp, and the Unreported Dress Rehearsal: Where Is Women's Volleyball Being Trained Before LA28?

An afternoon in Anaheim, California. Inside Honda Center, the ice sheet once used by the Anaheim Ducks has been covered with a grey insulating tarp. There are no spectators. A few dozen people in technical jackets walk the empty seating bowl with radios clipped to their belts.

They are measuring.

The distance from the edge of the court to the first row. The height of the ceiling. The angle for a camera position on the east stand. The time it takes an athlete to walk from the locker room to the tunnel — in seconds, with a stopwatch.

Nobody scores. No scoreboard is switched on. No whistle cuts through the silence.

That is how an Olympic cycle begins. With work nobody reports.

I read the item on a warm evening in Nha Trang, with my old notebook open beside me — the one where I once counted the articles written about a women's volleyball final that drew more than three thousand people into an arena. Three articles. I counted three times. It was still three.

The detail that made me sit up was a word. Honda Center was described as a rehearsal environment for the 2028 Olympic volleyball tournament, set up a year ahead. You do not rehearse a venue. You rehearse a performance. And in every performance, someone stands under the lights while someone else waits in the wings.

This article is about who stands where.

An arena built for another sport

Honda Center opened in 2026. It was designed for ice hockey, built as the home of the Anaheim Ducks, and for more than three decades it has lived on the NHL calendar, on concert nights, on stages erected at centre ice.

Its capacity for hockey sits around seventeen thousand. Set beside a women's volleyball world final, that is not small. It is larger than most arenas the Southeast Asian national teams play in every year. It is larger than anything the Vietnamese women's team has ever played before in a competitive fixture on home soil.

But the interesting number is not capacity.

The interesting fact is that an arena designed for a different sport has to be converted for volleyball, and the conversion has to be rehearsed. A year out. With a stopwatch.

In the events industry this is called a test event. At Olympic level it is part of a mandatory operational sequence: lighting systems, electronic scoreboards, athlete and official flows, broadcast camera positions, the video challenge system, even the time a team bus takes from hotel to arena in rush hour.

None of those items concerns who serves better than whom.

Which is exactly why I care.

LA28 and the venue map

To understand why volleyball is going to Anaheim, you have to look at how the Los Angeles 2028 organisers allocated venues.

LA28 chose a strategy unlike most recent Games: maximum reuse of existing infrastructure, minimum new construction. This is the Games that talks constantly about not leaving white elephants behind.

The result is a venue map spread across the second-largest metropolitan area in the United States, from downtown Los Angeles out to Inglewood, Carson, Long Beach, and south into Orange County, where Anaheim sits.

Indoor volleyball goes to Honda Center. Beach volleyball goes to Santa Monica Beach, the birthplace of the sport in the 1920s, when people strung a net over sand and hit whatever they could find across it.

The logic is clear. Honda Center already exists. It has operations staff, parking, decades of experience handling crowds. No public money needs to pour concrete.

But there is an operational cost attached.

Anaheim sits roughly fifty kilometres southeast of downtown Los Angeles. In normal traffic, that is forty-five minutes to an hour. On a Thursday afternoon in July, it can be double. During the Games, when the city is staging dozens of sports at once, that stops being a small thing.

Put another way: volleyball — a sport where, indoors, the distance between spectator and athlete is a few metres — has been placed far from the heart of the Olympic flame.

That is a logistical fact, not a complaint. But it has consequences.

The long shadow of Long Beach Arena

If you want a precedent, it is right there.

In 2026, Los Angeles hosted the Olympics for the second time in its history. Volleyball was staged at Long Beach Arena. Those Games also marked a turning point: indoor volleyball had been an Olympic sport since Tokyo 2026, men's and women's from the very first edition, but it was in the mid-1980s that the sport entered its full commercial era.

At Los Angeles 2026, the United States men won gold on home soil — one of the moments that defined the sport in that country. And if you ask me what lingered afterwards, the answer is not the medal.

It is that the United States women won silver at the same Games, and for years afterwards the volume of coverage given to the men dwarfed that given to the women by a margin you did not need to measure to know.

Forty-four years later, in 2028, volleyball returns to the Los Angeles metropolitan area. This time to Anaheim.

I cannot say whether history repeats. I can say this: every rehearsal tells you something about the priorities of the people running it.

The twelve-seat machine

To understand how an event in Anaheim can affect a team in Soc Trang or Thai Binh, you need the Olympic qualification mechanism.

The Olympic volleyball tournament has twelve men's teams and twelve women's teams. Twelve. Not sixteen, not twenty-four.

That means that out of the hundreds of national federations operating under the International Volleyball Federation, twelve qualify. The ratio is far harsher than football, where thirty-two teams contest the men's World Cup.

And here is the part many fans miss: in the most recent qualifying cycle, the host nation took one place. Continental and pool qualifiers took most of the rest. The final places were allocated on the world ranking at a pre-set cut-off date.

That pre-set cut-off is one of the cruellest mechanisms in team sport.

Imagine a team that plays far better in the final two years of a cycle, but whose best run comes after the ranking freeze. It counts for nothing. Volleyball is one of the few sports where your form can be administratively frozen.

For the LA28 cycle, the International Volleyball Federation adjusted the qualifying structure again. The number stays at twelve, but the road to it has been redrawn: continental champions, high finishes at the world championships, and the remainder decided by ranking.

For Southeast Asian teams, a structural change is never just a matter of re-reading the rulebook. It reshapes training schedules, event selection, and squad rotation across the two years before qualifying begins.

The ranking and the points nobody watches

I read the women's world ranking the way I read a diary, not the way I read a results table.

The reason is in the maths.

The federation's ranking does not simply count wins and losses. It weighs set scores, opponent quality and competition tier. A 2-3 defeat to a strong side can be worth more than a 3-0 win over a weak one.

For smaller teams this creates a useful paradox: losing well to a strong opponent can be worth more than only playing easy matches.

But to lose well, you have to be scheduled against a strong opponent. And to be scheduled, you have to be at the events whose entry is allocated by ranking.

That circle closes at one point. Teams already inside the system find it easier to stay inside. Teams outside find it hard to get in.

I saw a version of this at a much smaller scale. In 2026, as a final-year student in Nha Trang, I watched a packed VTV Cup final and then went home and counted the coverage. What I understood was that absence is not an event. It is a habit.

At international level, that habit is called the calendar.

Three pools and a narrow door

At the Olympic finals, twelve teams are split into three pools of four. Three group matches each. The top two from each pool advance, plus the two best third-placed teams. Eight teams into the quarter-finals, then straight knockout.

This structure creates what I call the third-place door.

For a team like Vietnam, that door is the most realistic target at an Olympic Games. It means: pick one match to win 3-2 or lose 2-3, and keep set differential from collapsing in the other two.

That is not a small ambition. It is a concrete match plan, and it requires something smaller teams usually lack — the capacity to absorb a controlled defeat.

Many Asian teams at this level lose not because they are technically inferior, but because they are not prepared to trail and still hold structure. Lose a first set 12-25 and the second set begins with resignation. Lose it 18-25 and the second set begins with intent.

On the ranking, that difference is worth points.

Why a rehearsal matters tactically

Now back to Honda Center, because the grey tarp over the ice has a very specific technical meaning.

Indoor volleyball is exquisitely sensitive to physical environment. More so than basketball or handball. More so than futsal.

The reason is the ball.

A volleyball weighs roughly 260 to 280 grams, has a diameter of about 21 centimetres, and is designed to fly along trajectories governed almost entirely by air resistance. When you serve a floater — no spin — the path is not a parabola. It wobbles. It oscillates unpredictably.

That oscillation depends on the airflow inside the arena.

An arena whose air conditioning blows diagonally from the north stand produces a different serve trajectory than one that blows down from the ceiling. This is the kind of detail teams must feel in their first training session, and it usually takes two or three days to adapt to.

At an Olympic Games, two or three days is the entire group stage.

Ceiling height and depth perception

The second factor is ceiling height.

The rules set a minimum clearance above the court. But minimum and actual are different things. In a large arena, a high ceiling means a ball hit high takes longer to come down — which changes how a setter decides the tempo of an attack.

Conversely, in arenas with low ceilings and dense rigging, defenders struggle with depth perception. A ball travelling into a bright zone is harder to read than one travelling into shadow.

Honda Center has a high ceiling and industrial lighting rigs suited to another sport. Converting it to volleyball requires recalculating the entire lighting system to meet international uniformity standards over the playing surface.

This is work no spectator ever sees. It is also the sort of work that, if done badly, decides a quarter-final.

The video challenge system

Another item on the checklist is the video challenge system.

I have a clear view on this, and I will state it plainly: the video challenge system does not reduce controversy. It relocates controversy from the court to the review room.

Before it existed, arguments happened between referee and player, lasted thirty seconds, and ended. After it, arguments happen between first referee, second referee, video official and coach, last three minutes, and end with a decision the spectators in the arena never see replayed.

At Honda Center, installing and calibrating that system is part of the rehearsal. Camera angles, transmission latency, image standards for determining whether the ball touched the floor or a hand — all of it has to be tested.

And the subtlest point: the system has to be tested with real human rallies, not simulations. Which means real players. Which means a technical rehearsal becomes an opportunity for teams to familiarise themselves with an arena before their rivals do.

Who gets invited to that rehearsal is a question I will return to.

## The floor and what lies under the tarp The next technical detail almost nobody notices: indoor volleyball requires a court surface with regulated elasticity, typically built on a subframe with padding layers.

On an ice rink, that adds a layer of complexity. The ice is kept chilled continuously so it does not melt, even when covered. That means the surface temperature beneath the volleyball floor is always lower than the air temperature in the arena.

The differential creates low-level air movement. Low-level air movement affects short serves and low sets.

I once watched a women's match in an arena converted the same way, and what I remember is not the result. I remember both teams missing serves in the first set at an unusually high rate, then correcting from the second. The decisive factor in that match was not the hardest hitter on the floor.

It was temperature.

The stands and the question of noise

Another aspect of Honda Center is its acoustic character.

An ice hockey arena is designed with a low roof, reflective materials and a closed bowl to trap crowd noise under the lid. When converted to volleyball, that character does not change.

For players, reverberation cuts both ways. It amplifies the thrill of scoring. It also degrades a setter's ability to hear calls.

At elite level, setters and hitters communicate with hand signals, with eye contact, and in some teams with short verbal cues. In a packed seventeen-thousand-seat arena, those cues disappear.

This is why Asian teams often add visual communication plans before tournaments in large arenas. And why one sixty-minute familiarisation session is worth more than a week at home.

Television, and whose prime time it is

This is the part I want to spend the most time on.

Los Angeles 2028 will run on Pacific Time. In summer, that is UTC-7. Vietnam is UTC+7. The gap is fourteen hours.

A women's volleyball match at seven in the evening in Anaheim will be watched live in Vietnam at nine the following morning.

A match at ten in the morning in Anaheim will be watched at midnight in Vietnam.

This is, to my mind, the single most important detail in the whole story of an arena half a world away. Because it determines who gets to watch, and when.

At recent Games, the favourable slots for Asian audiences have tended to fall in the evening, when major events are scheduled in Europe or the Americas. With Los Angeles, that structure inverts. Morning in California is midnight in Hanoi. Evening in California is morning in Hanoi.

Broadcasters will negotiate to place the biggest matches in the slots that suit their markets. A Vietnam women's volleyball match in Anaheim, if one ever happens, will be slotted somewhere in that grid — and someone decides where.

When every microphone points one way, I choose to stand in the gap.

I say this not as criticism. I say it because I once produced a programme nobody gave me airtime for.

The podcast season

In 2026, when the pandemic emptied every studio and tournaments were postponed again and again, I made a twelve-episode podcast about women athletes I considered forgotten. I recorded in a small room, on a cheap microphone, learning to speak to an imagined listener.

That season, the world shut its doors, but podcasts opened an auditorium.

Three months later, each episode was reaching around five thousand listens. At the time, for a junior staffer, that was a signal. I was given the right to propose a dedicated segment.

I mention it because it connects to Honda Center. A seventeen-thousand-seat arena holds three thousand times the audience of a podcast. But both answer the same question: where does someone outside the frame go to speak?

In Anaheim, the answer is: wait until 2028, and buy a ticket.

On a podcast, the answer is: start tonight.

The count

I grew up counting.

In 2026, during a men's World Cup, while the newsroom chased big names, I counted something else: the number of women referees in the history of the men's World Cup.

In the men's World Cup, I counted the women who appeared. Fewer than the goals.

That count produced a four-part series, and it was the reason I was offered a full contract.

Now I apply the same count here.

How many rehearsal sessions will an Olympic arena need? How many women referees will work at Honda Center in 2028? How many women sit in the event operations team? How many in the broadcast production crew? How many tactical analyses of women's volleyball will be written in the year before the event?

I do not have answers yet. But I know one thing: in 2027, when the first rehearsal happens in Anaheim, the coverage of it will be smaller than the coverage of a star posing in the Olympic Village.

That is not a prophecy. It is a pattern I have recorded often enough to write down.

Where Vietnamese women's volleyball sits

Now the part I care most about.

Vietnamese women's volleyball is at an odd moment.

Over the past decade, the national team has moved from a position outside the regional map to a team that appears regularly at Asian level and has begun to appear on the world stage. Names like Tran Thi Thanh Thuy, Nguyen Thi Bich Tuyen, Le Thanh Thuy, Hoang Thi Kieu Trinh, Doan Thi Lam Oanh and Nguyen Khanh Dang have become familiar to domestic audiences — and to a slice of the regional audience.

But "beginning to appear" and "competing for an Olympic place" are different distances, and the distance is measured in the two things I mentioned: calendar and ranking.

To reach a Games, a Southeast Asian team needs at least two of three conditions: a generation deep enough to play three big matches in seven days; entry to events that carry ranking points; and a preparation cycle of at least three years that is not interrupted.

The third is the hardest.

Tran Thi Thanh Thuy and the limits of one player

I have followed Tran Thi Thanh Thuy since she was one of the young faces of Vietnamese women's volleyball, through her seasons abroad and her return as the team's anchor.

She has something I call the capacity to carry responsibility. The kind of player a setter still feeds in a bad situation, and who still scores at a respectable rate.

But volleyball is a sport in which one player cannot drag six.

At Asian level, a team with one dominant attacker can still win plenty, because defensive quality and match speed remain manageable. At world level the maths changes. Leading European and American teams serve with a pressure that collapses your first-contact system inside two sets. When first contact collapses, the setter runs everywhere. When the setter runs everywhere, the main attacker receives in poor positions. When the main attacker receives in poor positions, the kill rate drops, and the match drains away.

I have seen that causal chain too many times with Asian teams.

What has caught my eye recently is how the Vietnamese team handles the second set. In many matches I have logged, they play a good first set, lose the second, then return in the third with a different structure. That signals a coaching staff that reads a match at the interval, not just one that prepares before it.

It is a positive signal that coverage routinely ignores, because it does not appear in the scoreline.

Bich Tuyen and the problem of the second option

In any volleyball team, the second option matters more than the first.

That is my observation, not a law. But it holds for most teams I follow.

The number one is the player opponents prepare for most thoroughly. The number two is the player they prepare for only when forced. When Nguyen Thi Bich Tuyen is on court with Thanh Thuy, the opposing block must split its attention. When the block splits, the setter has more choices.

The problem is availability. A pair of powerful attackers is only worth something if they are on court together in the decisive matches, and to be on court together they must both stay fit across a three-year cycle.

In Vietnam that collides with another reality: the women play across many competitions — domestic league, regional cups, Asian events, and in some cases leagues abroad. That density is not excessive. It is excessive relative to the recovery structures available.

Every transfer is a farewell signed in ink.

And in women's volleyball, each time a leading player moves abroad, the national team gains a player tested at a higher level — and loses her from the system during key windows.

It is a trade-off nobody wants to discuss, because both sides of it are reasonable.

## Nguyen Tuan Kiet and a compressed cycle The hardest thing for a Vietnam women's head coach is time.

Not time in a match. Time to prepare.

A European national team can spend two straight months together in summer, full squad, at a fixed training centre. A Southeast Asian team must stitch its windows around club schedules, multi-sport Games and regional tournaments.

Which means the coach must choose: spend scarce time building a new system, or reinforce the old one for short-term results.

Most Southeast Asian coaches reinforce the old one. It is a reasonable political and media choice. But it means every cycle poses the same problem.

When a team never has enough time to change, it can only get better at what it already does.

That is a ceiling.

The SEA Games and overlapping calendars

A structural factor that gets the least discussion: regional multi-sport Games.

The SEA Games happen every two years. For Vietnamese women's volleyball, that is the arena with the largest media significance — larger than any Asian championship in terms of domestic audience. A SEA Games gold can generate a wave of attention that a fourth place in Asia cannot.

But the SEA Games fall in December or May depending on host, Asian Olympic qualifiers tend to fall in September, Asian championships in August, world championships in October.

With a fourteen-player squad, four events across six months is a load even strong teams must rotate through.

And here is the key part: nations with depth can send a B team to one event and an A team to another. Nations with limited depth must choose. When you must choose, you choose the event with the highest domestic media value — not the event with the highest ranking value.

That misalignment is part of why some Asian teams never accumulate enough points.

The narrow side door

In recent Olympic cycles, one important door has been the tournament for teams below the top tier of the world ranking — where the winner earns promotion to the top annual competition.

It is a very narrow door, because it has one place.

And it is the most valuable door for teams like Vietnam, because it does not require beating four of the best teams in the world. It requires beating three teams from your own tier.

The problem with such tournaments is variance. Three matches, all knockout, in one arena, over four days. In those conditions, one afternoon in which your main attacker rolls an ankle ends a whole cycle.

Big teams do not have this problem because they have replacements. Small teams do.

That is the entire difference between being on a stage and being on it regularly.

The apprenticeship stage

When a team squeezes through that narrow door and reaches the top annual competition, what follows is usually brutal in the short term and valuable in the long term.

Because the top annual competition has certain characteristics: an enormous number of matches, opponents at every level, a dense schedule, and no recovery time.

For a debutant, the outcome is usually a run of defeats punctuated by a win or two of psychological value.

But the real value lies elsewhere: every week against a top-ten side teaches something practice cannot. It teaches you how to lose a set 18-25 instead of 12-25. It teaches you how to dig a ball from an attacker who is two metres tall.

At national level, that is a course no school offers.

I have seen this with many teams. Where a federation accepts short-term results in exchange for sustained presence at high-level events, real progress follows.

Where a federation only seeks results at regional events, it stands still.

Counter-intuitive: whose word is "rehearsal"?

Here is my argument.

When an organising body says an arena will be a rehearsal environment for the Olympic volleyball tournament, it is talking about operations — facilities, systems, people.

But the word has a second consequence that matters more.

It places an entire sport in the posture of preparing for a different event. The arena is not the stage. The arena is the practice room. And in a practice room, nobody keeps score.

Which means that throughout the build-up, public attention points at the building rather than the athletes. At infrastructure rather than the people who will compete in it.

I recognise the pattern clearly.

At recent Games, coverage of venues, costs and logistics has routinely exceeded coverage of match tactics. For women's sport, the skew is wider still.

In Paris, the beach volleyball stadium at the foot of the Eiffel Tower generated thousands of articles. Tactical analyses of the women's beach matches there were far fewer. That is my own count.

For Anaheim I expect the same shape. The arena will be written about. The hitters will be written about less.

I say this not to complain. I say it to prepare.

Commercial value and competitive value

This is the point I want to make most clearly, and it may be where I diverge from most commentators.

I believe the growth of women's volleyball over the next decade will not be decided by the quality of the play. It will be decided by broadcast scheduling.

The reason is simple and unromantic.

A sport acquires commercial value when it creates a habit of watching. That habit forms from two things: a stable time slot and enough matches. High-quality play can create a memorable match. It cannot create a habit.

Look at the women's sports that have built large audiences over two decades, and the pattern is consistent: they have an annual competition with a fixed calendar, stable broadcast, and enough teams that audiences learn faces.

Women's volleyball has such an annual competition. The problem is that it admits only a limited number of teams, and entry is decided by a system Southeast Asian teams struggle to crack.

In other words: the quality is not missing. The door is.

And when the door is narrow, most Vietnamese viewers never get to see their team play the world's best regularly. Without that, they cannot build a habit. Without a habit, no commercial value. Without commercial value, no money to widen the door.

It is a loop I have watched repeat across many women's sports.

The thing that breaks it is rarely a medal. It is a broadcast contract.

What I think will change

I am not writing this to predict results. I am writing to log signals I think matter over the next three years.

The first is in LA28 itself. Staging indoor volleyball in an existing arena fifty kilometres from the centre means organisers will have to work harder to fill it. For women's volleyball, that may bring an unexpected benefit: the arena may not sell out, and when an arena does not sell out, broadcasters have less crowd footage to sell — so they have to talk about the match.

That is a hypothesis of mine, and it may be wrong. But it is worth watching.

The second signal is in the training halls. If you believe in an Olympic cycle, you prepare now, not in 2027.

The third is in the stands. At recent domestic events I have seen more young spectators. That is a change I did not expect. It means Vietnamese women's volleyball is acquiring a new audience, and that audience does not need a result to watch — they watch because they are already in the habit.

A habit is beginning to form.

What nobody has written yet

Let me tell you about the person I believe will be the most important figure in Vietnamese women's volleyball over the next ten years.

I do not know her name. I have never met her. She may be twelve or thirteen right now, practising reception in a provincial arena, with a coach telling her where to stand so the referee does not call a fault. Her family may never have watched an Olympic women's volleyball match, because the broadcast slot in Vietnam lands at midnight.

I write about arenas, qualification systems, broadcast time zones and ceiling heights because all of it reaches her.

I do not only report the match. I report the people ranked below the scoreboard.

Honda Center will not know her name. But I hope that by 2028, someone in Anaheim will stop a stopwatch, log the time it takes a female athlete to run from the locker room to the court, and the answer will not be "not in the plan".

Takeaway

When the first rehearsal happens in Anaheim in 2027, very few people in Vietnam will know about it. There will be a quiet afternoon in a seventeen-thousand-seat arena, a grey tarp over the ice, and a few dozen people with radios measuring the distance from the court edge to the first row.

What they measure will shape a serve in a quarter-final in 2028. And that serve, if we are lucky, will be broadcast live in Vietnam at nine in the morning, while many of us are on the way to work.

The best I can do right now is keep a notebook, count what nobody counts, and wait to see who scores.

The best you can do is switch it on that morning, whether or not your team is in Anaheim.