From Honda Center to Los Angeles 2028: Volleyball's Dress Rehearsal in Anaheim

Honda Center, Anaheim, California. The stands are dark. The ice sheet that belongs to the Anaheim Ducks has been covered with an insulation layer, and on top of it crews roll out the playing surface and raise the net. Eighteen thousand seats sit still, waiting for one announcement.

The announcement arrived, and I read it twice. According to the Los Angeles 2028 organizing committee, in a notice dated August 13, 2026, Honda Center will be the indoor volleyball venue of the 2028 Olympic Games. One year before that, the same arena will stage an international national-team event that serves as a dress rehearsal. The building is not in downtown Los Angeles; it stands in Anaheim, Orange County, roughly fifty kilometres south of the city centre.

In more than twenty years of calling volleyball finals live, I have seldom given time to rehearsals. My trade belongs to deciding nights: the whistle, the ball hammered into the floor, a crowd holding its breath before a serve from the back line. One sentence has stayed in my notebook for years: “It is easy to look at a victory; understanding the sleepless nights takes an epic.” A dress rehearsal is a sleepless night scheduled in advance.

An arena three decades old

Honda Center opened in 2026 under the name Arrowhead Pond of Anaheim. For three decades it has been home to the Anaheim Ducks, and it has hosted basketball, exhibition tennis and hundreds of concerts. The Los Angeles 2028 organizers chose a long-running multipurpose arena instead of building new, part of a wider strategy to reuse existing infrastructure.

For indoor volleyball, a capacity of roughly eighteen thousand seats matters. It is large enough for an Olympic semifinal and close enough for spectators to hear a coach call a play from the bench. The first row sits only a few metres from the sideline — the kind of space where every touch has a witness.

The expected format keeps the familiar structure: twelve teams per gender, two groups of six, four teams from each group into the quarterfinals. Every side plays at least five group matches before knockout volleyball begins. The host United States holds a guaranteed place; the rest of the field is filled through continental qualification, the world championships and the FIVB world ranking. Ranking points are awarded match by match, including in the Volleyball Nations League, so a win in mid-June can become part of a ticket to California two years later.

On broadcast, rights are split by region, match windows are built around multiple time zones, and the on-site broadcast compound is on the list of items examined during 2027.

What is actually being tested

A rehearsal checklist sounds dry: lighting, air conditioning, sound, the movement paths of the referee crew, the mixed zone, the challenge-camera system, data lines. From outside the court, each item on that list is a variable.

A dark map has no lamps, but the guard always lights a fire. The people testing the lights at Honda Center in 2027 are doing exactly that: lighting the fire before the crowd arrives.

The playing environment shapes the flight of the ball. An arena converted from an ice surface has a cold base, dry air and air-conditioning currents crossing the court at an angle. Teams that arrive early and spend their first session simply feeling the bounce of the surface and the float of the ball often hold an edge in the first set — the window in which errors accumulate fastest.

Then come the silences. I watch every match at least three times, and on the third pass I only look at the seconds before the serve: how the formation shifts, how the libero signals, how the coach stands up and sits down. In an arena of eighteen thousand, that silence stretches. The crowd is louder, but when the referee whistles for serve, the whole building can go quiet for two seconds. Those two seconds cannot be rehearsed in a gym.

In modern volleyball the setter is the jungler of the map. A jungler among the towers, carrying the whole forest into the fortress. Setters do not score the most, but they set the tempo, choose the moment for each attacker and are often the only player who sees the entire opposing formation at once.

The road from Manila to Anaheim

For Vietnamese volleyball this story is not abstract. In July 2026, Vietnam's women beat Belgium 3-1 in the FIVB Challenger Cup final in Manila to claim a place in the Volleyball Nations League. The 2026 season was the first time a Vietnamese women's team appeared in that competition. No Olympic medal came with it, yet a door opened: every VNL match carries ranking points, and ranking points are the shortest route into the Olympic qualifying race.

Trần Thị Thanh Thúy, the captain who has played in Japan and Korea, will turn thirty in Los Angeles. Nguyễn Thị Bích Tuyền, a wing attacker, will also be at the peak of her career. Age is only a number; an epic is written in blood and ink. For a Southeast Asian national team, the Olympic dream does not live in one big match but in hundreds of small points collected across three seasons.

The pressure of the qualifying structure falls on annual events. A country without deep squad rotation must choose: load up on the VNL for points, or protect key players for continental competition. A coaching staff that solves that equation wrongly loses the ticket before qualifying even starts.

A rehearsal for whom

A rehearsal measures organizers, not athletes. In 2027 Honda Center will open for an international event with a moderate crowd, an atmosphere far from an Olympic quarterfinal, and nothing at stake. Players walk out to learn a floor; nobody walks out with a medal in mind.

Three things a rehearsal cannot test. The sound of nerves in the two seconds before a decisive serve in the fifth set. The fatigue that piles up after ten days of competition. And the officiating: in a big arena every line call has four cameras waiting, and a point can be erased by a single frame.

Volleyball has pushed technology deeper than most sports. The challenge system turns line judges into record-keepers and turns attacking instinct into an item that can be reviewed. I understand why federations choose that road: fairness is not negotiable. But my job is to sit beside the court and see an attacker hesitate for half a beat, because she knows that even when the ball hits the floor the story is not over.

Big arenas carry a price too. Asian halls of four or five thousand create an intimacy that eighteen thousand seats cannot buy back. There, the ball hitting the floor sounds like a fist on a door; in a big arena it dissolves into cold air.

What remains after the lights

In the summer of 2028 Honda Center will glow and team names will sit on the scoreboard. What deserves attention in 2027 is more modest: the entry list, the number of matches, the FIVB ranking that follows, and whether a Southeast Asian team is still in the race. If it is, the road from Manila to Anaheim will be longer than any flight.

At fifty-five, I am still looking for maps nobody has printed yet.