Anaheim's Olympic Dress Rehearsal: Honda Center, a Draft One Year Before the Opening Ceremony

Honda Center sits in Anaheim, California, roughly forty kilometres south of downtown Los Angeles. The arena opened in 2026, holds around 17,000 spectators for indoor sports, and for more than three decades it has been tied to the Anaheim Ducks ice hockey team above all else. In the summer of 2028, that ice sheet will be pulled out, the concrete beneath it treated, and a regulation volleyball floor laid on top. No medals will be awarded in Anaheim in 2026. Only a dress rehearsal.

I first sat in the commentary seat in Binh Duong in 2026, at twenty-five, and I have since followed more than seven Olympic Games and countless continental tournaments. The biggest lesson I learned has little to do with technique. The decisions that shape volleyball are rarely made on court; they are settled in venue meetings, at broadcast rights tables, and in a world ranking quietly updated every week. Anaheim belongs to exactly that category of story: no line-up, no system, no scoring statistics. Only a venue, a format, a broadcast feed and a qualification mechanism.

The Binh Duong commentary seat in 2026 taught me this: the ball rolls first, the story follows. The ball in Anaheim will roll in July 2028, long after everything else has been decided. The time between now and the opening ceremony is not empty space. It is the window in which every error in logistics, lighting, broadcast flow and qualification slots must be resolved, because once the whistle blows nobody can fix anything anymore.

The Los Angeles 2028 Olympic Games are scheduled from 14 to 30 July 2028. The LA28 organising committee set one governing principle: no new permanent sports venues will be built. Every competition site falls into one of three groups — existing structures that are renovated, temporary structures that are erected and dismantled, or natural sites used as they are. Honda Center belongs to the first group. It is a multi-purpose arena that has operated for more than thirty years, with climate control, lighting, locker rooms, athlete tunnels and parking already meeting the standards of a North American professional league. For the organisers, that is an enormous saving compared with pouring concrete for a new arena.

Indoor volleyball at LA28 has been assigned to Honda Center. The choice has its own logic. Indoor volleyball needs an enclosed, roofed space with load-bearing rigging for lights and camera systems and a controllable air flow — things an open stadium cannot guarantee. An ice hockey arena meets nearly that entire list from day one, because ice hockey also demands precise floor conditions, stable temperature and tightly managed spectator flow.

Historically, Honda Center has hosted many events beyond hockey: basketball games, concerts, martial arts cards. Converting the building is not new to the operations crew there. What is new is the scale. An Olympic Games is not a single concert night; it runs for many days, with multiple national teams, different training schedules for each, and requirements for doping control, press areas and mixed zones. All of that has to fit inside a building designed for a different sport.

As for format, Olympic volleyball currently runs with twelve teams in each of the men's and women's events, split into two pools of six, playing a single round robin, with the top four in each pool advancing to the quarter-finals. That format was introduced in Tokyo and continued in Paris. Splitting into two pools of six instead of two pools of four, as was the case before 2026, significantly increases the number of matches, and that is why an arena with enough training space on the same site becomes a valuable asset. A team reaching a medal match must play eight matches in roughly seventeen days. That intensity leaves no room for a logistics failure.

The qualification mechanism is the part Vietnamese audiences notice least, and the part that decides most. The host slot belongs to the United States. The remaining slots are allocated through continental championships, Olympic qualifying tournaments and the world ranking. That ranking is accumulated mainly through the Volleyball Nations League — an annual competition with a large number of matches, where every win converts into points under a formula that accounts for the opponent's ranking. Put differently, a team can lose an Olympic berth because of a defeat in a VNL pool match in a city nobody remembers, on a June night, two years before the opening ceremony.

On the other side of the ocean, Olympic broadcast rights in the United States sit with NBCUniversal through the 2032 Games, with the streaming platform Peacock as the primary outlet. That means the schedule in Anaheim will be designed first for American prime time, and only afterwards for other markets.

This is where the arithmetic gets interesting. Los Angeles in July sits at UTC-7, while Vietnam is at UTC+7, a fourteen-hour gap. A match starting at seven in the evening local time reaches Vietnamese screens at nine the next morning — a good slot. A match starting at noon local time airs in Vietnam at two in the morning. Meanwhile, American television prime time runs from eight to eleven at night, which is nine in the morning to noon the following day in Vietnam. That overlap sounds fortunate, and it genuinely is — but only for matches scheduled in the evening. Afternoon pool matches will land between one and four in the morning Vietnamese time, which is why Asian viewership regularly drops sharply during the early phase of Olympic Games held in North America.

What does the Anaheim rehearsal actually test? First, floor conversion time. A hockey arena has a refrigeration system running beneath the surface. When converting to volleyball, that system must be shut down, the floor covered with an insulating layer, and a removable sports floor installed. For an Olympic tournament running many days, with beach volleyball held at a coastal site as well, organisers need to know exactly how many hours each conversion takes, and how many staff it requires. That is the kind of data you only get by doing it for real.

Next comes the question of lighting and cameras. Volleyball is a sport with extremely high ball speeds — a male attacker's spike can exceed 100 km/h. At that speed, broadcast cameras need a fast enough shutter, and the lighting system needs a high enough frequency to avoid flicker on screen. Lighting in a hockey arena is designed for a small puck moving on a flat plane; lighting for volleyball must serve a large ball travelling on three-dimensional trajectories, frequently backlit against the stands. A good rehearsal is one that discovers the old lighting rig needs replacing before the summer of 2028 arrives.

The biggest problem Anaheim poses is not technical, it is geographic. Honda Center sits in Orange County, outside the city limits of Los Angeles. That forty-kilometre gap, at rush hour, can mean an hour and a half of travel. For an athlete based in the Olympic Village, that is a real journey. For a spectator holding tickets to two different sports on the same day, it is an equation with no solution. The LA28 organisers accept that risk because they chose a dispersed model, using existing infrastructure instead of building new. The price of the saving is travel time, and travel time is something athletes feel more sharply than anyone else.

In the United States, volleyball is not a second-tier sport as it is in many places. Women's college volleyball — the NCAA — is one of the most heavily attended sports products in the country. On 30 August 2026, the match between Nebraska and Omaha was staged at Memorial Stadium in Lincoln, Nebraska, drawing 92,003 spectators and setting a world record for attendance at a women's volleyball match. Set the 17,000 seats of Honda Center beside that figure and you get a sense of the ticketing pressure in Anaheim: a market cultivated over decades, a young audience used to buying season tickets, and very high expectations.

Spectators are the least predictable variable. An Olympic Games in the United States has its own character: the vast majority of tickets are bought domestically, and most sports struggle to sell out their pool rounds. Women's volleyball is an exception. In Tokyo, matches involving the Japanese women's team sold out every time. In Paris, matches involving France and matches featuring strong sides such as Italy, Poland and Brazil filled the arena. In Los Angeles, the United States women's team will play at home, and it is the first time in decades they will have a genuinely home Olympic Games as medal contenders. The pressure from the stands will be enormous, and it will be nothing like Tokyo — where the arena was almost empty because of the pandemic.

When the media runs faster than the ball, the storyteller must know when to stop. One year before the opening ceremony, the Anaheim story is being told optimistically: a successful rehearsal, a venue that is ready, a cheap and sustainable Olympic model. I see a familiar romanticisation in that. Who does the rehearsal actually de-risk? It de-risks the broadcaster, the sponsor, the organising committee and the local government. It does not de-risk the athlete, because what makes an athlete collapse at an Olympic Games is rarely a loose signal cable; it is usually a missed serve at the decisive moment, in front of seventeen thousand people.

A rehearsal tests the plumbing, not the nerves. That is the structural limit of every test event: you can simulate a match, but you cannot simulate the feeling of being eliminated. In Tokyo in 2026, with no spectators, players said they could hear the ball hitting the floor and the squeak of rubber shoes. In Paris in 2026, with spectators, the noise inside the Porte de Versailles arena was loud enough that some teams had to change their signalling. Those two conditions cannot be rehearsed simultaneously in Anaheim.

I am also wary of the surprise-team narrative. A team reaching an Olympic semi-final for the first time is usually framed as proof of a successful development system. Look closer, and most of those breakthroughs come from two things that are very hard to reproduce: a favourable pool draw, and a match in which the lead attacker peaks on exactly the right day. Volleyball is a sport where one individual can change the course of two sets, in both directions. One good tournament does not prove a decade of development. It only proves that over those seventeen days, everything clicked.

Back to the ranking. The current points system uses a formula in which the winning team gains points according to the opponent's ranking and the set score. A low-ranked side beating a high-ranked side gains a great deal; losing to a weaker opponent costs heavily. The mechanism encourages strong teams to field their best line-ups rather than rest players — something commercial tournaments rarely achieve. But it also creates a new kind of pressure: every VNL match is a wager, and a team can lose its place in the leading group simply because of one poor week at a distant stop on the circuit.

I keep watching how federations talk about load management. On paper, it is the science of protecting athletes. In practice, the calendar grows denser and commercial flights multiply, while rest days between stops barely increase. An athlete who wants to protect ranking points has to play; an athlete who wants to protect a knee has to sit out. Nobody wants to say plainly that those two desires conflict, because saying it plainly would force a choice.

On the broadcast technology side, an Olympic Games in North America will bring notable changes. Since Paris 2026, sports television has shifted strongly toward cloud-based production, with many feeds assembled elsewhere rather than on site. In Los Angeles, the distances between venues and the demand for low latency will push that model further. For viewers in Vietnam, the practical result is more stable picture quality and more camera angles, but also more paid content packages. Rights fragmentation has been obvious in recent cycles and will not reverse.

Based on my experience watching matches, there is a small detail few people notice: in an arena converted from hockey, the distance from the front row to the sideline tends to be greater than in an arena purpose-built for volleyball. For spectators in the building, that reduces the sensation of the ball flying close to the floor. For television, it is an advantage, because a higher camera angle shows the team shape and blocking positions more clearly. The Binh Duong stands had no television feed, yet the fans knew every footstep by heart — they remembered where each blocker stood without a single frame of footage. I once thought that was a disadvantage. Later I understood it as a different way of watching, and sometimes a more accurate one.

My contrarian read on Anaheim is this: the greatest value of the dress rehearsal lies in the contracts, not in the athletes. A venue that has been tested is easier to sell tickets for, easier to pitch to sponsors, easier to negotiate with broadcasters. That is the logic of the events industry, and it is entirely reasonable. But when the story is told as a purely sporting story, that telling leaves out most of what is actually happening.

I also want to address the long-term consequences. When an Olympic Games uses only existing infrastructure, the legacy left to the host city tends to be thinner than for a Games that builds new. There is no new arena left to the schools. There is no new complex left to the clubs. What remains is a week of light, a wave of tourists, and a transport system patched in a hurry. For Orange County, Honda Center was already there in 2026; it will still be there after 2028, exactly as before. That is good for the budget, and worth thinking about for anyone who believes the Olympics always leaves something grand behind.

For volleyball, there is one genuine bright spot. Placing the sport in a large arena, in a market with a strong college volleyball tradition, means tickets will sell and American television audiences will exceed the sport's usual Olympic levels. That is good for the chances of keeping volleyball in the long-term competition programme. But it also means federations will increasingly have to weigh broadcast windows when setting schedules, and teams from Asia and Africa will play more matches in the middle of their own night.

For Vietnamese volleyball, the distance to Anaheim is not measured in kilometres. The Vietnamese women's team has improved markedly in recent years, with attackers such as Nguyen Thi Bich Tuyen and Tran Thi Thanh Thuy repeatedly carrying the scoring burden at continental events and on the international stage. But the road to an Olympic slot runs through the world ranking, and the world ranking is accumulated through wins at tournaments Vietnam does not yet regularly qualify for. It is a hard loop to break: no place at major tournaments means no points, and no points means no place at major tournaments.

In Southeast Asia, volleyball is among the most-watched sports, partly because the court sits close to the crowd and partly because domestic leagues are widely broadcast. It is a market international organisers know exists, but it usually ranks behind larger markets when time slots are chosen. An Olympic Games in Los Angeles will make that gap clearer, not erase it.

Seen from Binh Duong, the Anaheim rehearsal raises another question. When a country already has the infrastructure, the market, a college system developing athletes and the broadcast rights, it can stage an Olympic Games without building a single new arena. When a country does not yet have those things, it has to start with one court with a net and a row of spectator seats. Those two starting points are very far apart, and that distance is not closed by inspiration.

I have sat through enough overnight broadcasts to know that a match at two in the morning in Vietnam happens in silence. Empty stands, empty studio, only viewers on screens — usually very loyal ones, and usually people who are never asked for their opinion when the schedule is locked. For years I have kept a habit: before every major Games, I print the schedule, convert everything to Vietnamese time, and mark the matches falling outside the eighteen-hundred to twenty-three-hundred window. That list tells me in advance which matches will be missed, no matter how good they are.

Looking back at the seven Olympic Games I have followed, one pattern is fairly clear. Games held in Europe and Asia generate far more collective memory for Vietnamese audiences than Games held in North America, even though the technical quality is in no way inferior. Atlanta 2026, Sydney 2026 and Los Angeles 2026 all left fewer traces in the memory of Vietnamese fans than Athens 2026 or Tokyo 2026. The reason lies in time zones and daily habits, not in the quality of the volleyball. For those of us in the profession, that is an injustice worth naming, because the best matches sometimes happen at an hour when nobody is awake to watch.

At fifty-two, I have realised that every arena is a universe and every player is looking for the way home. Honda Center in Anaheim will be such a universe in the summer of 2028: an ice sheet pulled away, a volleyball floor laid down, twelve national teams walking out to their anthems, and forty kilometres of highway connecting it to a city hosting the Olympic Games. The rehearsal happening now will make things run more smoothly. It will not make anyone less nervous.

What I want to know in July 2028 is not whether the lighting system meets the standard. What I want to know is whether a young attacker, standing at the back line, hearing seventeen thousand people inhale at once, can still remember how she plays. No meeting room can answer that. Only the court can, and the court always answers late — later than every news bulletin.