Honda Center, a One-Year Buffer and the Women's Volleyball Equation at the 2028 Olympics

In the darkness of the press room, I learned to read between the questions. This time there was no press room to sit in. Only a tidy announcement from the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic organizing committee, a few lines about the Honda Center in Anaheim hosting volleyball, and one sentence I read over and over: the arena would be used as a rehearsal space, before the machinery of official qualification began to turn. Thirty-three years of writing have taught me that announcements like this rarely make noise. No one writes about an empty stand. No one argues about a parking lot. But inside those empty spaces, people build the things that decide who competes, who gets seen, and who is left outside the television frame. I read that information on an evening in Binh Duong. On the screen, the Honda Center appeared as a vast concrete block beside a freeway, some forty minutes by car from downtown Los Angeles. The arena opened in 2026, with a capacity of over eighteen thousand seats when set up for basketball. For volleyball, the number drops slightly because the court and technical zones take up space. To most readers, these details are dry data. To me, they are the map of a preparation. At the Olympics, every sport is a machine of hundreds of gears. Volleyball is no exception. Twelve men's teams and twelve women's teams, divided into two pools of six, with the top four from each pool advancing to the quarterfinals. The format sounds simple, but to run smoothly across more than two weeks, organizers need to know exactly which light does not dazzle the line judge, which camera does not block the referee's view, which warm-up area is wide enough for twelve athletes at once, and whether the water pipes in the women's changing room carry enough pressure for an entire team to shower within twenty minutes after a match. It sounds trivial. But I once watched a women's tournament have its schedule shifted because the changing room did not have enough mirrors. A detail that small was enough to shake the psychology of an entire squad before the ball was even served. So when organizers speak of a buffer year, I understand what they mean. They are buying time to fix mistakes that no one wants to fix under the pressure of an Olympic final. The bigger picture lies in the structure of the tournament. Since volleyball became an official Olympic sport at Tokyo 2026, the number of participating teams has changed many times. The current twelve-team format is maintained as a compromise between television appeal and sporting fairness. To make that list, a women's national team must travel three roads: continental qualification, the world ranking, and year-round point-scoring events such as the Volleyball Nations League. There is no shortcut. There is no wildcard reserved for federations with market power. That narrow door is why I always tell my younger readers to read the world ranking the way one reads a geopolitical map. Every point is a flight, a training session, an injury kept secret. Behind every victory by a small women's national team stands an entire logistical system that no camera ever films. The Honda Center, in this picture, is a special link. It is not merely a place where matches happen. It is a laboratory. Organizers will test the lighting, the sound, match operations, and even the layout of the mixed zone where reporters meet athletes. I was once the only female reporter in a mixed zone at a SEA Games. I know what it feels like to stand at the edge of a crowd, waiting for an answer. And I know that the design of that space decides who speaks and who is drowned out. A buffer year before the Olympics is nothing new. Recent Games have all featured test events. What stands out here is that volleyball is placed in a multi-purpose arena that has hosted basketball, ice hockey, and concerts. That flexibility comes at a cost. The court must be dismantled and reassembled, the suspension system must be recalculated, and organizers must prove that an arena not born for volleyball can still honour volleyball. Based on my experience following matches, a court that is quickly assembled usually sounds duller. The ball hitting the floor does not echo, and the squeak of shoes is shorter. For fans in the stands, that may not matter. But for a setter who needs to hear the footsteps of teammates behind her to adjust the rhythm, it creates an invisible layer of noise. Such small errors only reveal themselves when the stage lights blaze. There is one point I want to stress, because it is often overlooked in reports about facilities: the budget for women's volleyball is always thinner than for men's. This holds in almost every national federation, even where women's teams are strong. A generously sponsored men's tournament is often accompanied by a women's event that must make do with the same arena but fewer match days, fewer broadcast hours, and smaller prize money. When an event like the Honda Center is announced, I always ask myself: among those rehearsal sessions, how many are set aside for women? This is where I think about Vietnamese women's volleyball. Twenty years ago, a Vietnamese female volleyball player who wanted to be seen had to win more, endure more, and stay silent more than her male colleagues. Today things have shifted, but slowly. Names such as Tran Thi Thanh Thuy, Nguyen Thi Bich Tuyen, and Hoang Thi Kieu Trinh have stepped into the international light, leaving their mark in Asian tournaments and even events of world standing. But for a Vietnamese women's team to reach an arena like the Honda Center in 2028, the road ahead is still very long. I do not say this to be pessimistic. I say it to give proper weight to every match. Every world-ranking point a Vietnamese women's team earns in the Volleyball Nations League or in Asian qualifiers is worth many times a friendly match. Because the scoring system does not favour teams from small federations. It rewards consistency, and consistency needs money, needs experts, needs long training camps abroad. In volleyball, three pillars decide success: blocking defence at the net, the first-pass reception system, and attacking efficiency in high-ball situations. At the Asian level, Vietnamese women's teams often do well in blocking, especially double blocks at positions three and four. The traditional weakness lies in the transition from defence to counter-attack. A good first pass without a setter capable enough to launch a quick ball is just a wasted effort. I have rewatched a great deal of footage from international women's matches in recent years. One pattern repeats: teams with modest physiques often choose a control-based style, hitting into the corners and maximising two-ball situations. Teams with superior height pour their strength into direct attacks and blocking. The clash between these two schools is the most fascinating part of women's volleyball, and also the hardest to analyse if one looks only at the scoreboard. A coach once told me something I wrote in my notebook: do not look at the score after each rally, look at where the setter is standing when the team loses a point. That sentence helped me understand that most collapses in women's volleyball begin with a wrong distribution decision, not with a weak spike. The viewer sees the spike. The person who understands the match sees the set. Back to the Honda Center and the buffer year before the 2028 Olympics. I think the real value of this event lies not in the format or the number of teams. It lies in the organizers publicly admitting that an Olympics must be rehearsed like a stage production, and that backstage details matter as much as the match itself. That sounds like common sense, but in my eyes it is a step forward in organisational culture. Yet I want to pose a counter-question. If a buffer year is enough to fix every infrastructural flaw, why do so many federations still leave women's teams training on worn courts throughout an entire Olympic cycle? The care given to a rehearsal arena often comes with neglect of everyday infrastructure. We are eager to fix the stage for the big night, but we let the training hall of female athletes quietly decay. This may be one of the hardest paradoxes of elite sport to see. I call it the paradox of the floodlight. Once the lights come on, everything becomes perfect. But the light shines only on the stands, not on the training room at six in the morning. Viewers do not see which female athletes had to ride motorbikes to practice. Viewers do not see a women's team using sacks of sand instead of weights. Once I travelled to a mountainous province to report on women's volleyball. The training ground was packed earth, and when the ball flew into the bushes, someone had to poke it out with a stick. One of the female athletes there trained while selling goods to raise a small child. When I asked about her dream, she smiled and said: I just hope the team is given a new net. A new net. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world, people are spending millions of dollars to test the lighting system for an Olympics. I tell that story not to compare who is better. I tell it to remind us that the distance between a rehearsal event and an ordinary training session is a distance that time does not fill by itself. Those quiet women do not need glory; they need a society that knows how to look. And a society that knows how to look does not only follow medals. It cares whether a female athlete is paid properly, receives full medical care, and can take maternity leave without losing her place in the national team. These are things that appear in no announcement about any arena. Gender equality in sport is a match with no final whistle. We may win a set, lose a set, then step into the next set without knowing how long it will last. I write for those who have never appeared in the sports pages. For female athletes training where there is no audience. And for those preparing an Olympics in which most of the work happens in windowless rooms. If you ask me whether the Honda Center event is worth waiting for, I will say yes. Not because it promises peak matches, but because it forces people to prepare seriously for a Games. And when someone prepares seriously, they often inadvertently reveal their weaknesses. From those weaknesses, readers can learn more than from any scoreboard. What interests me most in a buffer year is not the parking lot or the sound system. What interests me is whether among the rehearsal sessions there is one set aside to listen to female organisers, female referees, female coaches. Because a tournament is only truly equal when the decision-makers are as diverse as the competitors. There is one final paradox I want to mention. Organizers usually measure an event's success by tickets sold and online viewers. But women's volleyball cannot be judged by the yardstick of men's volleyball. Women's matches often last longer, with more extended rallies, demanding greater endurance. If we impose the same media standard on both, we inadvertently create failures that do not exist. I learned this after years sitting in the corner of a stand, watching women's matches covered as a side item. The way cameras are placed also decides how the story is told. If the camera focuses only on the face of the scorer, we miss the entire system standing behind her. If the camera pulls back a few metres, we see the whole formation moving as one mass. With the Honda Center, I hope organisers will disclose the camera layout during the rehearsals. Because that layout will tell us who the protagonist of the 2028 Olympic story is. To close this piece, I do not want to offer a summary. I only want to leave one thought. When an empty arena is carefully prepared before an Olympics, people usually speak of professionalism. But to me, true professionalism does not lie in repairing the stands. It lies in ensuring that every female athlete who steps onto the court has a fair chance, just like her male counterpart. A buffer year is enough to fix a roof. A buffer year may also be too short to fix a prejudice. And I will still be here, following every step of the preparation, to record both.