Honda Center, Anaheim, and a Year of Rehearsal: Where Women's Volleyball Sits on the LA28 Map

Among the venues of the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic Games, Honda Center sits in Anaheim, Orange County, California, roughly 50 km southeast of downtown Los Angeles. The LA28 organising committee has placed the entire volleyball programme, men's and women's, in this arena. About a year before the opening ceremony, the same building will serve as a testing room: a large international women's volleyball event will be staged there as a dress rehearsal for the Games. I read that news on an evening in Nha Trang, after a match in the national championship had finished. On my desk was a notebook I have kept since 2026, where every page is a count. I record every time women's volleyball appears in Vietnam's major sports outlets: one stroke for one article. That night I added a new line, Anaheim 2027 and 2028, and then sat still for a long while. There are two halves to this news, and they are not equal. One half is recognition: women's volleyball placed in an arena of nearly 18,000 seats, with broadcast infrastructure built to Olympic standard. The other half is the word rehearsal. When every microphone points in one direction, I choose to stand in the gap. Honda Center opened in 2026 as the home of the Anaheim Ducks in the NHL, with a capacity that ranges from about 17,000 to 18,000 depending on configuration. On the LA28 map it belongs to the southern venue cluster, separated from the downtown area that holds the athletes' village, the main press centre and most of the competition programme. LA28 has committed to limiting new construction and squeezing maximum use out of existing infrastructure, and Honda Center fits that requirement precisely: a multi-purpose arena with experience in professional sport, sitting beside Orange County's transport and hotel network. Volleyball entered the Olympic programme at Tokyo 2026, with both men's and women's events from that very first edition. Sixty years later the framework still holds at twelve teams, pooled, then knockout. Olympic places are allocated through a layered mechanism: the host nation, the FIVB ranking, the continental championships and the final qualifying tournaments. In the women's game, most of the points that shape the ranking come from the Volleyball Nations League, a multi-week competition staged across several countries, and the one place where every serious national team has to show up. For Vietnamese viewers, one technical detail matters more than the name of the arena. Anaheim is in the Pacific time zone, fourteen hours behind Vietnam. A match played at 19:00 in California reaches Vietnamese screens at 09:00 the next morning. For years, Vietnamese women's volleyball fans have been used to waking at two or three in the morning to watch VNL matches staged in Europe. A morning slot is a far bigger change than it looks on paper. To understand why the Anaheim news deserves a pause, it helps to remember how far Vietnam's women's team has travelled. In July 2026 the team won the FIVB Challenger Cup in Manila, earning a place in the 2026 Volleyball Nations League. In 2026 the team appeared for the first time at the women's world championship, hosted by Thailand. Tran Thi Thanh Thuy, Vietnam's leading attacker, has been one of the faces of the team on those international stages. Vietnam's position in the FIVB ranking has risen accordingly, placing it among the leading nations in Asia. From a team that only appeared in regional events, Vietnam's women are now present at tournaments where every single match carries ranking weight. I still remember an afternoon in Nha Trang in 2026, when I was a final-year broadcasting student and happened to attend the VTV Cup. The final drew more than 3,000 spectators, eight international teams, and an atmosphere inside the hall that made anyone present stay until the last ball. That night I went home and counted: of twenty news items on major sports events across a few leading platforms, only three mentioned the women's volleyball tournament taking place in my own city. I wrote a short analysis, asked why, and the piece gathered 2,500 reads in 48 hours. That was the first time I understood that a simple count can carry more force than a complaint. A year later, during the 2026 World Cup in Russia, the entire intern newsroom chased Ronaldo and Messi. I sat down and counted female referees across 92 years of the tournament's history, and found a blank sheet. At the men's World Cup, I count women who appear on screen, and the number is smaller than the number of goals. The four-part series I proposed afterwards reached 10,000 reads, the highest in the newsroom that month, and it was the reason I was offered a full contract after graduation. That habit of counting explains why the name Honda Center matters. An 18,000-seat arena devoted to women's volleyball at an Olympic Games is the highest physical presence the sport has ever had at a single edition. But the same habit reminds me to be careful: seat numbers have never been the same thing as attention. Based on my own experience of watching matches, there is one technical difference that coverage tends to skip when comparing arenas. Indoor volleyball at VNL level is usually played in halls of 5,000 to 10,000 seats. Sound bounces back quickly in a space like that, creating a feeling of closeness and density. Put the same match inside an 18,000-seat arena and everything shifts: the distance from the front row to the sideline grows, the crack of the ball on the floor arrives later, and the tension a crowd transmits to the players thins out if the stands are not full. On the operational side, converting a hockey rink into a volleyball court demands several layers of work: adjusting sightlines, laying a synthetic sports floor over the ice surface, calibrating ceiling height for high balls, and installing lighting that meets Olympic standards. For broadcast, high-angle camera positions, signal lines, electronic advertising boards and the post-match interview area all have to be tested under real match conditions. A rehearsal event exists precisely for these things. That is the technical reason a women's event was chosen. There is another reason, less discussed: the Vietnamese community in Orange County. Little Saigon, spread across Garden Grove and Westminster, is one of the largest Vietnamese communities outside Vietnam, and it sits about twenty minutes' drive from Honda Center. Throughout 2026, when Vietnam's women's team played the world championship in Thailand, the stands held a very large Vietnamese support. In California, that distance is far shorter. If Vietnam's women qualify for LA28, Honda Center becomes a home court on foreign soil, a situation without precedent in the history of Vietnamese women's volleyball. Nobody opened a broadcast slot for me, so I went looking for ears that had never been served. In 2026, when studios stood empty because of the pandemic, I produced a twelve-episode podcast about women's national team players who had been forgotten, among them Huynh Nhu, who at that point had scored more than 50 goals for the national team. Within three months each episode reached 5,000 listens. That road taught me something that still holds when I look at an 18,000-seat arena: audiences exist before the stage does, and the job of an organiser is to go and find them, not to wait for them to arrive. At the same time, women's volleyball worldwide already has markers that show the ceiling of the sport. On 30 August 2026, in Lincoln, Nebraska, a women's volleyball match staged at the University of Nebraska's football stadium drew 92,003 spectators, the highest attendance ever recorded for a women's volleyball match. At Paris 2026, women's volleyball sessions at South Paris Arena 1 sold out repeatedly, and the French organisers identified the crowd atmosphere as one of the strengths of the competition. In other words, a large capacity is not the problem for this sport. The problem is whether anyone wants to fill it. But one detail makes me pause for longer. Under FIVB rules, a rehearsal event or international friendly usually carries no ranking points, or only a negligible amount. The consequence is that strong national teams tend to send a second squad, a youth team, or a group of players in need of a form check. A testing room filled with squads like that can examine the lifts, the lighting, the signal lines and the guest-flow process, but it cannot examine the one thing that matters most: whether elite women's volleyball can pull 18,000 people to Anaheim. If the real purpose were to prove the sport deserves a big arena, the test would carry points, the strongest squads and an Olympic place hanging above it. Only a match nobody wants to lose can measure the weight of a crowd. A match in which both sides can substitute freely measures the quality of the air conditioning instead. There is one more point about geography. Under the LA28 model, the athletes' village and the main press centre sit in the central area. Volleyball in Anaheim means that on every competition day, athletes and reporters cover a long distance, in a Games that has set a target of limiting private cars. That distance is not only a transport matter. It is a matter of coverage time: an event placed far from the centre, on the same competition day, tends to receive less press presence than one staged next to the main zone. At Paris 2026, the success of women's volleyball came from proximity. The arena stood inside the city, spectators arrived by metro, and that atmosphere became part of the match itself. Anaheim has better infrastructure and a larger capacity, but it sits outside the main current of the Games. The commercial value of a large arena and the competitive value of a sport do not always point in the same direction. All of this can still change. If organisers schedule women's volleyball in strong broadcast windows, if the Vietnamese community in Orange County joins the Korean, Filipino and Chinese communities of Southern California in filling Anaheim, and if Vietnam's women's team finds a route to LA28, then that arena will hold an atmosphere no technical report can measure. My notebook still has plenty of blank pages. I do not know what I will write in it in the summer of 2028. But I know one thing for certain: if Vietnam's women's team ever walks into Honda Center, I will count, and this time I will count how many Vietnamese spectators stand up when the line-ups are announced. I do not only tell the match; I tell the people ranked below the scoreboard. And in Anaheim, there may be a match where those people stand in front of the scoreboard.