Honda Center and the LA28 Dress Rehearsal: Women's Volleyball Enters Its Biggest Testing Room

I arrived in Anaheim on a late-summer afternoon, carrying the notebook that has stayed with me through fourteen years in this trade. Honda Center rose up with more than eighteen thousand seats across three tiers, a low roof, and the golden lighting typical of North American arenas. The first thing I did, as always, was count. I counted the screens around the main concourse replaying rallies from women's national teams. I found four, out of twenty-three screens. Four.

Nobody asked me to do that. But fourteen years standing at the edge of arenas taught me that the smallest numbers often tell the largest stories. When every microphone points in one direction, I choose to stand in the gap — and this time the gap is a multipurpose arena in Southern California, selected as the volleyball venue for the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic Games, and also the site of an international tournament treated as a dress rehearsal for that event.

The choice of Honda Center was not a sudden decision. For years, the LA28 organizing committee has pursued a strategy of maximising the existing infrastructure of America's second-largest metropolitan region. The Anaheim arena, roughly fifty kilometres south of downtown Los Angeles, meets almost every criterion: large capacity, climate control suited to an indoor sport, long-completed transport and parking infrastructure, and most importantly — it does not need to be built from scratch.

But what caught my attention was not the infrastructure. It was the word "rehearsal". A tournament staged here before the Olympics is not merely a test of broadcast lines or electronic scoring systems. It is a test of how a sport gets framed: what the format looks like, what broadcast windows it receives, and who is placed at the centre of the stage. In Anaheim as much as at the Olimpico, those seemingly technical decisions shape the fate of an entire generation of athletes.

Format is the first problem. Large international volleyball tournaments usually run on a two-tier model: an extended pool phase that generates enough matches for television markets, followed by a compressed knockout phase over a few days. For an arena like Honda Center, this model carries obvious advantages — organisers can sell tickets by day, fragment the audience, and, more importantly, extend the exposure time of on-court sponsors.

But there is a paradox few people mention. The more pool matches there are, the lower the average quality of each match. In women's tournaments, the gap between the top group and the middle group tends to be wider than in the men's game, because investment in women's national teams is uneven across continental federations. The result is that the early days of a pool phase easily become a run of lopsided scorelines, and neutral viewers — the very audience an Olympic organising committee needs most — tend to drift away before the tournament finds its rhythm.

From a technical standpoint, I believe this is one of the most serious things to test in Anaheim. The ideal format for an Olympic dress rehearsal is not the one with the most matches, but the one that preserves tension in every set. An eight-team single round-robin, plus semifinals and a final, usually produces a far higher share of close matches than an expanded model. I have watched many women's tournaments across Asia and Europe, and the pattern repeats fairly consistently: the fewer teams but the more selective the field, the higher the average quality per set.

Alongside format, the Olympic qualification mechanism is the part ordinary fans notice least — and the part that most affects tournament quality. A berth in the indoor volleyball Olympic tournament is usually allocated through three routes: the host nation's slot, slots from dedicated qualifying tournaments, and remaining slots based on the world ranking. That third route turns every match in events like the Nations League, continental championships, or World Cups into a transaction. Winning a match is not just three points in the standings — it is a handful of ranking points, and a handful of ranking points can decide an Olympic ticket.

For women's volleyball, the consequences of this mechanism are very concrete. Federations with limited budgets are forced to pick and choose their calendars: they cannot attend everything, so they choose the events that yield the most points. That unintentionally creates a spiral — strong teams get into more major events, accumulate points quickly, while mid-tier teams must weigh every flight. For the Vietnam women's national team, the story in Anaheim is not a distant one. Every international tournament staged in a major hub shifts the relative value of the events the team can attend, and therefore shifts the entire four-year points-accumulation strategy.

Broadcast is the third problem, and perhaps the decisive one. Over the past century, the fate of a sport in a new market has often been decided not by technical quality, but by its broadcast window. I once sat in the press room of an international women's volleyball tournament where a media official explained that the final had been moved two hours earlier because it "needed to make room for another event". Nobody in the room challenged it. I wrote down the scheduled time and the actual finish time, then added them up. The match Vietnamese viewers watched latest was the one rated highest for technical quality.

This is why I treat the broadcast test in Anaheim as important as the court test. If an event here is only streamed live in windows suited to the North American market, then a large share of Asian viewers — where women's volleyball has one of the largest followings in the world — will reach it through short news bulletins or highlight reels. And when all you can watch is a highlight reel, you cannot see what happens between rallies: how a libero moves, how a coach substitutes, how a team adjusts its defensive system after losing the first set.

The value of a tournament lies not in whether it appears on television, but in how much of the match it lets the audience actually see. That is the measure I apply to every event I follow, from a friendly in Nha Trang to a continental final.

On the technical side of play, a multipurpose arena poses several specific problems that dress-rehearsal organisers are forced to solve. Indoor volleyball is extremely sensitive to air currents. An HVAC system designed for basketball or ice hockey can create airflows that push a serve's trajectory off by a few centimetres — enough for a libero to misread the landing point, enough for a rally to change hands. At national-team level, such small deviations are not written into the match report, but they appear in video analysis and in the tactical decisions of the following match.

Lighting is the same. An evenly lit court helps blockers read the spin of the ball better. Conversely, a court with dark zones behind the baseline reduces the effectiveness of spectacular digs. These are the kinds of details audiences do not see, but coaches do. From a purely tactical standpoint, a dress-rehearsal event also has value because it generates data. At national-team level, coaching staffs often use tournaments like this to test line-ups: rotating the outside hitter slot, trialling a two-libero system, or checking a young attacker's ability to handle pressure in deciding sets.

This data is not widely published. It sits on the laptops of assistant coaches, and sometimes only surfaces through a small change in the starting line-up at the next tournament. For those who follow the game closely, this is valuable information — and it is exactly the kind of information mainstream media rarely mines, because it does not produce headlines. Players like Tran Thi Thanh Thuy or Nguyen Thi Bich Tuyen grew up through precisely these kinds of tournaments — where the result was not the only thing brought home.

At this point I have to say something that may not be easy to hear for those thrilled at the idea of Honda Center becoming a "cathedral" of women's volleyball. Commercial value and competitive value are two lines that do not run parallel. An event staged in a modern arena, with a television contract and global sponsors, can easily be a lower-quality sporting event than a small tournament held in an old gym — if the second gathers exactly eight strong teams and the first is merely an occasion to test broadcast lines.

I have seen that many times. A heavily promoted tournament with six teams, two of which arrive with patched-together line-ups, produces four matches of little meaning. Conversely, a tournament ignored by domestic media, with eight evenly matched teams, produces sets I am still taking notes on today. Nobody gave me airtime, so I went looking for ears that had never been served. A few years ago, when studios shut down because of the pandemic, I produced a podcast series on women's national-team players who were rarely mentioned. In a season when the whole world closed its doors, podcasts opened an auditorium. Those episodes had no beautiful graphics, no reporters standing courtside, but they reached an audience mainstream media had never served.

That lesson applies directly to Anaheim. An arena can be called an icon, but an icon does not automatically generate memory. Memory is created by specific matches, by specific athletes, by moments you have to sit long enough to see. And here is the most counter-intuitive part: if the LA28 organisers are genuinely serious about the legacy of women's volleyball, what they need to test in Anaheim is not the arena's capacity. What they need to test is whether the qualification system is fair to cash-poor federations, whether broadcast windows respect Asian audiences, and whether the format preserves tension. Those three questions cannot be settled by a sponsorship contract.

I do not just tell matches; I tell the people left behind the scoreboard. And in a dress-rehearsal event, those people are often the bench players, the video analysts, the medical staff — the ones who, if the tournament succeeds, will be named by nobody. Once, I stood in the corridor leading to the warm-up area and watched a young outside hitter rehearse a blocking movement alone for nearly forty minutes after the match had ended. No camera pointed her way. But that is exactly what a dress rehearsal needs to record, if it truly intends to prepare for something larger than itself.

When I left Honda Center, it was already dark. I looked back at the seat I had occupied and thought about the three years remaining before the Olympic flame is lit in Los Angeles. Three years is long enough to change a format, long enough to adjust a broadcast window, and long enough for a small federation to accumulate enough ranking points. Three years is also short enough for wrong decisions to become permanent.

What I want to see in Anaheim is not a prettier arena. I want to see an honest dress rehearsal — one where people dare to try things that might fail, instead of merely performing things guaranteed to succeed. Because if a dress rehearsal exists only to confirm that everything is fine, then it is not a rehearsal. It is a show. And women's volleyball, after more than a century pushed to the edge of the stage, deserves more than a show.