Honda Center and the 2028 Olympic rehearsal: Volleyball tests itself in Anaheim

Honda Center in Anaheim has a row of seats that is never sold. It sits behind the sideline, hidden behind the ice hockey goal frame whenever the arena returns to its old shape. There, crews place the lighting console, the television signal junction box, a small table for recording the speed of airflow coming out of the air conditioning system, and a few stacks of notes from the technical team. The roughly seventeen thousand seats in the stands always face the net. That row faces the opposite way, toward the things nobody applauds. When a volleyball match is staged inside an arena born for another sport, the audience's memory usually keeps only the score. I remember that row. Across seventeen years in this trade, I have learned something that sounds paradoxical: what determines whether a sports event survives often sits at the edge, not at the center. A name mispronounced three times is still a true story, if you are willing to listen carefully. And in Anaheim, the name being read most often is Honda Center. Honda Center is located in Anaheim, California, about forty kilometers southeast of downtown Los Angeles. It is a multi-purpose arena with a capacity of roughly seventeen thousand seats for hockey, and it can hold more when reconfigured for indoor sports. It was once the home arena of the Anaheim Ducks in the North American professional hockey league, and has hosted large concerts and many mixed martial arts events. But what brought Honda Center into volleyball headlines lies in a multi-year decision: it will be the venue for indoor volleyball at the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic Games, with dates expected from July 14 to July 30, 2028. I came to Anaheim not to sit in the technical area, but to write a script for a documentary about the journeys of small teams toward Olympic qualification. In other words, I stood exactly at the edge I always prefer. From that edge, I saw an event that the organizers call a rehearsal for Olympic volleyball. That rehearsal has three layers. The first is the playing surface: a specialized mat, net and posts installed to international competition standards, distances from the sideline to the spectator rows remeasured, and escape zones for referees, line judges and the medical team marked out with colored tape. The second is the broadcast layer: the number of camera positions, elevated angles, super slow-motion cameras along the sideline, and signal feeds from sensors beneath the floor. The third, and the least mentioned, is the human operations layer: how many ball retrievers, how many ticket scanners, how many volunteers guiding spectators from the parking lot to the entrance. Of those three layers, the third is the most fragile, and it is also the layer a documentary like mine can capture most. I sat all afternoon near gate number seven, watching a young volunteer hold a bilingual sign, quietly reciting team names so as not to mispronounce them in front of the crowd. He mispronounced the name of an Asian team three times in a row, then blushed and apologized to his supervisor. I did not laugh. I had once been in exactly that position, on a night of broadcast rights, when I mispronounced a midfielder's name three times in the first half and had viewers call in to complain. That is why I believe a rehearsal does not only test machinery. It tests the muscle memory of an entire apparatus. An empty stand during a pandemic season is not silence; it is the echo of the people who were once there. An arena with twenty thousand seats, when empty, will tell you about itself through the sound of footsteps, tape being peeled off, a ball bouncing on a wooden floor. Those sounds never appear on television, but they are the first thing anyone stepping onto the court must learn to hear. In terms of format, the Anaheim event is designed as a concentrated round, where several national teams play a round robin over a few days, each meeting once, and results count toward the international federation's ranking points system. That organization is not new. What is new is that it is placed inside an arena that will go on to serve the Olympics, and is broadcast to many markets, including Asia. California's Pacific Time runs roughly fourteen to fifteen hours behind Vietnam, depending on the season. A match played at seven in the evening local time falls around nine to ten in the morning the next day in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. For Vietnamese viewers, that is the slot of people checking their phones during a work break. For broadcasters, it is a slot that can sell advertising. For organizers, it is just a line in a spreadsheet. Those three views never overlap, and that gap is exactly where stories get forgotten. I once followed a similar round abroad a few years ago, sitting in a cafe in Chengdu at ten in the morning, scribbling notes while listening to commentary in a language I did not command well. When the match ended, I had only three lines written, but those three lines later became the backbone of a film chapter. My experience of watching matches has taught me that the most valuable thing is not the final score, but the way a stand falls silent or erupts at one particular moment. In terms of qualification mechanics, Olympic volleyball operates on a multi-tier system. The host nation of the Games gets an automatic berth. The remaining places are allocated through continental qualifiers, a global competition, and the international federation's ranking, updated match by match. That means every match in a distant arena like Honda Center is not just a win or a loss, but an addition or subtraction to a number a national team must carry for two years. For Vietnam's women's volleyball, this is a story both familiar and painful. The national team has risen strongly on the Asian stage, and has had individuals who forced international tournaments to take notice, such as Tran Thi Thanh Thuy with her wing hitting and refusal to give up, or Nguyen Thi Bich Tuyen with her opposite-position spikes. But the distance between being noticed and winning an Olympic berth remains very large, because the ranking system rewards teams with the means to play often, travel often, and sustain a stable roster over many years. In the summer the women's team fell apart, I learned that a team does not die on the court; it dies when no one is left to tell its story. I once stood in the middle of an empty training hall in Chengdu, looking at plastic chairs still bearing traces of sweat, and understood that an Olympic berth is not decided only by rallies above the net. It is decided by who still has enough money to buy plane tickets, who still has enough people to train, and who still has enough patience to keep telling their story. Back to Honda Center. Converting a hockey arena into a volleyball court is a technical problem far more interesting than its surface suggests. Crews must strip the ice layer, rebuild the cooling system, lay down a temporary floor with a completely different elasticity, and then recalculate the air-conditioning flow so the ball does not drift. A draft a few percentage points stronger can turn a safe serve into a service error at a deciding point. That is the kind of detail no spectator sees, yet it sits in every coach's mind. Alongside that is the challenge replay system, something I always watch with a wary eye. In modern volleyball, the right to request a replay has become part of tactics, sometimes more important than a substitution. Coaches save their challenges for sensitive moments, and sometimes the very wait for a replay verdict cools the momentum of a team on the rise. The thin line between correcting a clear error and smothering an explosive moment is one this sport will keep debating. At the edge of the court, there is a job television almost never names: the ball retriever. They are teenagers in uniform shirts, sitting motionless in four corners, darting out only during the two seconds between rallies. The speed of an elite volleyball match depends partly on them. A retriever half a second slow can make the rhythm of the match sag. I spent an entire session counting how many times a boy in corner number three stood up, and the number surprised me: more than two hundred times in one match. No one gives him a medal. Ticket prices are also a story at the edge. A large arena in California means large operating costs, and those costs must be recovered from somewhere. For a Vietnamese family wanting to take their child to an Olympic volleyball match, the equation is not just the ticket price, but also airfare, lodging, and time. The people who can sit in rows near the net at an Olympic match are often not the people who love volleyball most. They are the people with the most means. That gap exists at every Olympic Games, and it is something no rehearsal can solve. Here is a contrarian view I consider necessary. People often say that putting volleyball into a big arena like Honda Center is a step forward for this sport. I am not sure. A big arena does not automatically create a strong volleyball culture. It creates a beautiful stage for television, a beautiful space for sponsors, and new pressure on small federations to afford bringing their teams there. If a rehearsal is called a volleyball rehearsal, yet most of the time inside it goes to checking feeds and lighting, then the right question is not whether the venue is ready, but who this sport is being prepared for. I do not oppose big arenas. I only want to note that a technical row behind the sideline never appears in any promotional footage, even though it is where the decision is made on whether a match gets broadcast at all. Volleyball is a sport of short distances and fast decisions, but it is also a sport of people standing at the edge. When we praise a venue, we often forget that the venue only matters when someone stands outside it to tell the story. A sports documentary is not meant to answer who wins, but to ask why people love it so much. The rehearsal in Anaheim is the same. When the lights go out and the technical row is dismantled, what remains is not a venue that is ready, but the question of whether an eighteen-year-old player in a faraway Vietnamese province still believes this arena belongs to her. Four years from now, when the opening whistle sounds in Los Angeles, we will know the answer.