Honda Center, Anaheim and the Silent Rehearsal of 2028 Olympic Volleyball

A morning in Anaheim, and the floor of the Honda Center has just been refinished. No spectators. A crew of technicians pulls the net to the exact center of the court, stretches a measuring tape, logs numbers onto a clipboard. Rubber soles squeak against wood in a space that is several times larger than a regulation volleyball court. That is the sound I always hear before a major tournament begins — not chants, but the sound of anonymous people taking measurements.

Anaheim is not a volleyball city. It was built around an ice rink. That high roof was designed to hold cold air, to let a hockey puck glide along the boards, to let fans sit in winter coats in the middle of December. Volleyball demands ceiling clearance, direct light that does not glare, and a floor whose bounce can be expressed in percentages. An arena born for another sport has to relearn everything from scratch. According to LA28's venue plan, the Honda Center will host indoor volleyball at the 2028 Summer Olympics — a venue more than forty kilometres southeast of downtown Los Angeles.

I have spent years taking notes in empty stands. When a stadium is empty, I can hear the walls give their speech. And the walls of the Honda Center are saying something rather cold: the 2028 Olympic volleyball tournament will be staged in an arena whose history belongs to a different sport.

Context: a no-build plan and a sport placed into a gap

LA28 pursues an almost absolute principle: no new competition venues. The city already holds enormous sports infrastructure from the 2026 and 2026 Games, plus the dense professional arena network of America's second-largest metropolitan area. Indoor volleyball was assigned to the Honda Center — home of the Anaheim Ducks since 2026, with a capacity of roughly eighteen thousand for indoor events.

This model has become familiar at recent Games. Tokyo 2026 placed indoor volleyball at Ariake Arena. Paris 2026 used South Paris Arena 1, a convention centre converted into a temporary arena. Rio 2026 chose Maracanãzinho, a multi-purpose hall that had existed for over half a century. Each time, volleyball is placed into a space that was not built for it, and each time, the sport must prove it can fill that space.

The LA 2028 tournament keeps the twelve-team format for both men and women, with pool play followed by knockout rounds. Qualification follows the mechanism shaped in the Paris 2026 cycle: host nation the United States receives one direct berth per gender, with the rest allocated through continental championships, world qualifiers, and a set of berths based on the International Volleyball Federation world ranking. On the broadcast side, NBCUniversal holds US rights and most content will flow through the streaming platform Peacock, with US team matches pushed into prime time.

These facts sound purely administrative. They shape nearly the entire fate of a sport for four years.

Core analysis: the distance between an arena and a sport

Indoor volleyball has very specific technical requirements. Free space above the court must reach at least about twelve and a half metres so the ball never strikes an obstruction — a number that sounds small, but when a jump serve rises to its apex, an error of a few dozen centimetres is enough to ruin a rally. Lighting must be even across the entire floor, with no dark zones and no glare that hides the ball as it enters a receiver's line of sight. The floor must have calculated elasticity and friction — elite volleyball is played on specialised synthetic courts, while many hockey arenas use hard wood or modular basketball surfaces.

That is why every time a Western professional arena is requisitioned for volleyball, organisers must go through an expensive conversion: laying specialised court material over the wood, recalibrating the lighting rig, blocking draughts from the air conditioning system, and most importantly, addressing sightlines. The stands of a hockey arena are designed for spectators tracking a small object moving low across ice. Volleyball moves high. The uppermost rows of the Honda Center, where tickets are cheapest, will be the hardest place from which to follow the ball.

I have sat in those rows. During a match with no spectators in a northern arena, I counted how many times line judges had to stand up because the ball fell into a blind zone. The number was not large, but it was enough to show that architecture determines how a sport is seen.

In Anaheim, the problem is also geographic. The Honda Center sits in Orange County, roughly forty to fifty kilometres from downtown Los Angeles depending on the route. At rush hour, that distance can swallow two hours. The Olympics is an event where most international spectators stay near the city centre and move on the organiser's public transport system. A venue off that axis will have two kinds of spectators: locals buying single-session tickets, and international visitors buying a ticket as part of an entire journey.

Yet that very location opens another door. Orange County holds the largest Vietnamese-American community outside Vietnam — Garden Grove, Westminster, Fountain Valley, Stanton. An estimated more than two hundred thousand people. An Olympic volleyball match featuring Vietnam at the Honda Center would be the largest community event for overseas Vietnamese in decades. It is a hypothesis organisers may not have accounted for, but it is real, and it has value.

And this is where the equation becomes concrete for Vietnamese readers.

Vietnam's women's team enters the LA 2028 cycle with a world ranking high enough to sit in the group chasing an Olympic berth, but not high enough to feel safe. The shortest path runs through the Asian Championship and the International Volleyball Federation's points system. Unlike football, where World Cup qualification is decided by a single concentrated tournament, Olympic volleyball is a multi-year accumulation race: every Nations League match, every continental round, every world championship pours points into one total table.

Based on my experience following Vietnam's women's team over many years, I notice a point rarely discussed: this team has improved markedly in organisation but remains weak at sustaining intensity across a long sequence of matches. Key attackers such as Trần Thị Thanh Thúy and Nguyễn Thị Bích Tuyền carry a heavy attacking load, and when match density rises, both usually see efficiency drop in the fourth set. That is a fitness problem, but the root lies in the domestic calendar.

A team that wants to contend for an Olympic berth needs a domestic league strong enough to generate regular competitive pressure. Looking at how leading Asian volleyball nations operate, the biggest difference lies in the number of high-quality matches an athlete accumulates before turning twenty-five. Nguyễn Thị Bích Tuyền, Lê Thanh Thúy, Nguyễn Thị Kim Liên — all are rare talents, but the supply of matches to forge them at the highest level is far thinner than for athletes of the same generation in nations with dense professional league systems.

Qatar taught me that a sports filmmaker cannot only shoot celebrations. An Olympic berth is not decided in the moment a team celebrates. It is decided in a March fitness session, when coach Nguyễn Tuấn Kiệt must choose between resting his key players or keeping them on court to protect ranking points.

Why the Honda Center is a test, and who the test is really for

There is an implicit assumption in how sports media describes the Olympics: that the tournament matters so much that venue is secondary. This is wrong. Venue is one of the decisive factors in whether a sport is remembered.

I still hold that the sports rights bubble has passed its peak. Nobody will say that at a press conference in Anaheim.

Streaming platforms buy Olympic rights at high prices in a race whose real goal is acquiring subscribers, not serving the sport's audience. Volleyball, as a discipline with a large global audience but low domestic advertising value in the United States, sits in the grey zone of that equation. The result is that broadcast slots, camera counts and production quality depend on an equation unrelated to the quality of play on court.

Tactics are how losers explain why they chose a different path. America's volleyball problem has never been technical quality. It is market structure.

So the Anaheim rehearsal must be read through a different lens. Organisers call it preparation one year before the opening ceremony — an administrative phrase, literally accurate. But what is actually being tested is not the net.

An arena outside the central axis, in a city with no tradition in this sport, with a demographically distinctive immigrant community, is a venue model entirely different from anything the Olympics has done. If it succeeds, it opens the way for a new standard: Olympic sports need not sit inside the host city. If it fails — empty stands, thin atmosphere, nothing for television to sell — that is a signal about this sport's limits within the American sports hierarchy, not about the quality of world volleyball.

There is another paradox in the qualification mechanism. The International Volleyball Federation's points system, as it has operated over recent cycles, tends to reward federations with the conditions to stage many international matches year-round. Volleyball nations that must go the long way through continental events to accumulate points often lose out on match volume, even when their win rate is equivalent. This is not an accusation. It is a design feature few read closely.

Blind spot: the rehearsal is not for preparation, but for justification

Imagine the Honda Center in July 2028. Suppose the US team goes deep, the stands fill, and television has a climax. Organisers will say: the Anaheim decision was right.

Suppose the US team exits in pool play — entirely possible in a tournament of twelve of the world's best teams. The arena is half empty. Television airs weekday midday matches in a city most Americans do not know has an arena. What will organisers say then? That American audiences do not care about volleyball?

Both scenarios are possible, and both were predetermined by a venue decision made years earlier.

The biggest blind spot of the "rehearsal" model is that it creates a perfect alibi. Infrastructure can always be declared technically ready. But technical readiness does not equal atmospheric readiness. And volleyball lives on atmosphere more than most sports.

I once logged fourteen matches during a season without spectators, and home-team win rates fell from roughly forty-eight per cent to roughly thirty-one per cent. A coach told me that without the shouting, his players passed far more timidly. Volleyball played in silence is no longer itself.

That is what the Honda Center will face, whatever its eighteen thousand seats. An arena that can hold eighteen thousand people does not automatically become an arena with eighteen thousand people.

At a deeper level, the Anaheim rehearsal reflects how the American sports system ranks Olympic sports. Prioritised sports sit at the centre, in arenas with a media history. Sports that must prove their value sit on the periphery. US indoor volleyball has a very strong collegiate scene — women's college volleyball has been one of the fastest-growing spectator sports in the country over the past decade — but the gap between collegiate success and professional appeal remains wide. The Olympics is a chance to close that gap, and placing the court in Anaheim makes closing it harder.

I am not saying volleyball will fail in Los Angeles. I am saying that if it succeeds, that success will come from its own strength, not from the system's support.

What about Vietnam

Volleyball begins when people stop arguing and start listening to shoes on a wooden floor.

In an empty arena, I see every chalk line telling its story through silence. In Anaheim, those lines will be drawn on a floor that once belonged to another sport, in a city with a Vietnamese community larger than anywhere outside Vietnam. If Vietnam's women's team is there in the summer of 2028, the noise from the stands will not come from neutral sports fans. It will come from people driving twenty minutes from Garden Grove to watch a team they have never seen play live.

That is the kind of scenario event organisers always say they want, yet rarely design a venue to welcome.

Vietnam's path there is not easy. It requires a tightly managed points cycle, a better domestic calendar to preserve key players' fitness, and a more serious approach to sports medicine. I maintain that an athlete's return timeline is usually controlled by communications departments more than medical ones, and the consequence is that unhealed injuries are pushed onto the court in matches where the team needs points. For a team with as precious a supply of matches as Vietnam's women, every premature return is a double loss.

In that context, I also see a longer-term problem.

How we assess athletic potential increasingly depends on data models. Metrics such as spike reach, hand speed and scoring efficiency per net appearance are collected and ranked from a very early age. Those models have obvious appeal, but they tend to inflate the value of young players — whose developmental range is unblocked — and undervalue the hardest thing to measure in a team sport: chemistry in the locker room. A volleyball collective can have a higher average spike reach than its opponent and still lose because its defensive system does not speak the same language. Data models cannot calculate that.

Vietnam has no advantage in athlete volume or international match count. Our real advantage, if any, lies elsewhere: the cohesion of a small collective operating as a professional family, where each player knows exactly where a teammate will move in a counter-attack transition. That kind of capital is not recorded in any ranking table.

What remains

As I write these lines, the Honda Center is still preparing. People will repaint the floor, lay the court, position the lights. Everything will be technically correct. Organisers will announce the arena is ready. And that will be true.

But a ready arena has never been a sufficient condition for a memorable Olympics. What keeps a Games alive in memory are moments nobody planned: a save at the sideline, a block timed perfectly, a coach standing still because he knows his player has done it right.

If Vietnamese volleyball is in Anaheim in 2028, I want to put the camera somewhere else. Not in the press box, not in the VIP stand. I want to be in the corridor, watching players walk out of the locker room, listening to their shoes on the concrete, before they step into the arena's light.

And I will ask something no ranking can answer: if an arena born for another sport can be taught to understand volleyball, can a small volleyball nation be taught to understand itself at a higher level?

In July 2028, Anaheim will answer. Not with a match, but with how many people stay seated after the fifth set.