Honda Center and the 2028 Olympic Rehearsal Room: What Gets Tested, What Gets Left Behind

I remember the sound more than the picture. In the summer of 2026, I sat in front of a black-and-white television in Belgrade and watched the women's volleyball final at the Los Angeles Olympics. The court was not inside the Olympic village. It was in Long Beach Arena, a long drive away, and inside the television frame the stands had gaps the director chose not to show. China won that match. The United States took silver. Japan took bronze.

Forty-one years later, a different arena in Southern California has inherited the role Long Beach once played: Honda Center in Anaheim. This time it is described with a very technical phrase — a rehearsal room. A warm-up stage for indoor volleyball at the Los Angeles 2028 Olympics, held about a year before the Games open.

I hear the word "rehearsal" and my skin prickles. The ball does not cry, but the storyteller does. In forty-two years on the edge of this profession, I have learned one thing: events labelled rehearsals are rarely only rehearsals for the people who walk into them.

Four lines of announcement and one large gap

The first item is the venue. Honda Center in Anaheim, California, seats roughly 17,000 to 18,000 depending on configuration, a building long used for NHL games and concert nights. For volleyball, that is one of the largest indoor spaces the sport has had in North America outside an Olympic context. Anaheim sits inside the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area, about 40 kilometres southeast of downtown, and inside the transport system the LA28 organisers have committed to using for most venues.

The second item is the format. The tournament is described along standard international volleyball lines: pool play seeded by the world ranking, then a knockout phase. The number of teams, the detailed pool structure and the day-by-day schedule were not fixed at the time of the announcement.

The third item is broadcast. A coverage package is confirmed as part of the plan, with time slots designed to serve the North American market first.

The fourth item, and the heaviest, is Olympic qualification. The tournament sits inside the world-ranking points window of the 2028 cycle. As hosts, the United States women already hold a place. The remaining places run through continental championships, the World Championship and the world ranking, with a final cut-off in 2028.

That is everything that was said. What was not said is who pays for the experiment, and what exactly is being tested.

The invisible things being measured

Start with what a rehearsal room actually measures. The floor. Indoor volleyball is played on a rolled synthetic surface, and every arena has its own rebound, its own grip, its own tone when the ball lands. Asian teams are used to fast, dry floors that keep the ball low. A different floor can turn a safe first pass into a ball that flies out of bounds. It is the smallest detail and the most overlooked one in any test event.

Then lighting and camera positions. Volleyball produces the fastest ball speed of any team sport — a spike from a top outside hitter can exceed 100 km/h — and at that speed the backdrop behind the blocker decides whether a viewer can see the ball at all. A building designed for ice hockey has a different lighting rig and a different big screen from one designed for volleyball. The cameras that serve hand-contact challenges and in-out calls have to sit at angles where no column and no advertising board blocks them.

Then the parts no spectator sees: anti-doping facilities, the medical vehicle route, evacuation procedures, the acoustics of 17,000 people shouting, and most importantly the travel time from team hotels to the court.

Based on my experience following matches, I know one thing about this kind of work. It is boring. It has no story. And it is the only thing that keeps a tournament from collapsing.

I have seen the opposite. In 2026, the Tokyo Olympics took place in arenas with no spectators. Those of us in television were placed in an unprecedented configuration: the sound of the ball, the squeak of shoes, the breathing of athletes became the entire soundtrack of the broadcast. There was no crowd noise to cover the silences. A sports event without spectators is not a sports event missing spectators — it is a different sport being played at the same time. The rehearsal room in Anaheim will not repeat that situation, but it must measure something similar: if the crowd does not come, what remains?

The trap called ranking points

This is the part I expect the media to get most wrong.

A tournament inside the Olympic ranking-points window allows nobody to rotate. A national team head coach may tell reporters that this is a chance to test combinations, but in the technical meeting they calculate differently. Every pool defeat is a deduction on the world ranking, and that deduction can be the difference between direct qualification and a trip through continental qualifying.

Put another way, what is called a rehearsal room is a rehearsal room for the organising committee and for the broadcaster. For the teams, it is a real match with real consequences, at exactly the stage of the cycle where every mistake is expensive.

That leads to a concrete consequence in terms of physical load. First-choice line-ups must play. Players aged thirty and above — the group that usually carries most of the international points — must grind through another tournament in an already crowded calendar. International volleyball now has the Nations League, continental championships, the World Championship, and regional friendly events. Every event carries points. Every point can be a ticket.

At fifty-eight, I no longer remember the scorelines; I remember the face of the blocker in the final minute. And that face, in recent years, has often belonged to someone playing her thirtieth match of the season.

Time zones, prime time, and who gets seen

There is one calculation I always run before any announcement about an event in North America.

A match in Anaheim at 19:00 Pacific time is 11:00 the next morning in Tokyo, and 09:00 the next morning in Hanoi, Bangkok or Jakarta. American television prime time lands squarely in the middle of the Asian working day.

That sounds like a broadcaster problem, but it does not stop there. Time slots decide which matches are selected for broadcast, which are pushed to secondary channels, and more importantly, which teams are shown. An Asian team playing while all of Asia is at work can win three matches in a row and still not be remembered. I do not count matches. I count the stories allowed on air.

Over my working life I have watched Japanese women's volleyball move from the centre of this country's television landscape to a sport that has to fight for a slot. In 2026, Japan's women won the Olympic title on home soil in Tokyo and the whole country stopped to watch. In 2026 in Montreal they won again. In 2026 in Los Angeles they were still on the podium with bronze. Then came a long silence, and it took until London 2026 for Japan's women to win another Olympic medal.

An event like Anaheim cannot fill that silence. It can do one thing: put women's volleyball back into the time slot where somebody stumbles across it while flicking channels.

What is not being tested

If the earlier section covered what organisers will check, this section covers what they will not check, and it matters more.

A rehearsal room cannot measure pressure. A test match can simulate the lighting rig, the camera positions, the number of seats and the bus travel times. It cannot simulate the feeling of a hitter standing behind the service line in the fifth set at 14-13, when one rally decides four years of work. There is no rehearsal room for that, and there never will be.

The second thing not tested is money. An event like this will be judged on tickets sold, on audience numbers, on sponsorship value. It will not be judged on whether prize money reaches the athletes, whether women's national teams are paid appearance fees proportionate to their workload, or whether television rights money is split in a ratio small federations can survive on. In international women's volleyball, the gap between the budget of a leading federation and a developing one can be large enough that the weaker team must choose between attending a tournament and paying its coaching staff.

The third thing not tested is the sustainability of the calendar. And here I want to be blunt: turning Anaheim into a rehearsal venue is not a gift to women's volleyball. It is a transfer of risk. The Olympic organising committee needs to know that its arena works. It needs to know before things become too expensive to fix. The cheapest way to find out is to stage a real tournament, bring in national teams at full strength, bring in broadcasters with their equipment, and let the athletes offer their bodies for inspection.

In that structure, women's volleyball plays its familiar role: the one who walks onto the floor first to check whether it is slippery.

There is one more blind spot I consider the most serious. Events like this are usually built on a model women's volleyball already knows well: a big arena, a handful of elite matches, a short media cycle, then it ends. What the sport actually needs is something else entirely — a steady competition system across the year, where audiences know where their team plays, when, and against whom. The stars of this sport, from Paola Egonu of Italy to Melissa Vargas of Türkiye, from Kathryn Plummer of the United States to Mayu Ishikawa of Japan, were not created by four-day events. They were created by being seen weekly, continuously, over years.

From the perspective of someone who has covered women's volleyball across four decades, this is the root problem. Women's competitions are still often designed as closed events rather than open, continuously competitive systems. A closed event can be beautiful for four days. It does not create stars. And it does not create audiences.

The ladder beneath Vietnamese women's volleyball

For Vietnamese readers there is another way to look at this worth holding onto.

Vietnamese women's volleyball has stepped onto a new rung in recent years. The national team, built around leaders such as Tran Thi Thanh Thuy, has appeared at continental and world-level arenas that once seemed out of reach. That progress is real, and it came from investing in a specific generation of players.

But that ladder has a ceiling, and the ceiling is marked by world-ranking points. Events like the one in Anaheim sit at a level Vietnamese women's volleyball is climbing toward rather than touching. The path upward does not run through one lucky match. It runs through accumulating points at continental events, holding a stable squad together for years, and building a domestic league strong enough that players do not have to go abroad to make a living at any cost.

I thought I was telling their story, and it turned out they were telling mine. When I watch a women's volleyball team trying to break through its own ceiling, I see myself at twenty-nine, when a television station in another city decided I no longer fitted the prime-time slot.

What I will be watching

I will not be watching the roof of Honda Center. I will not be watching the attendance figure at the opening match, because it will be reported as better than it was.

What I will be watching is the roster sheet. If the strong teams bring their first-choice line-ups and play at the intensity of a decisive match, then Anaheim has done its job. If they bring second-string squads and treat it as a test trip, then this announcement is just an announcement, and what is being tested is ticketing rather than the ability to stage an Olympic Games.

The second thing I will watch is the Asian broadcast schedule. If the tournament goes live in Vietnam, Japan, Thailand and China at reasonable hours, then something real is shifting. If not, then all the talk of global growth is just part of the press release.

The third is the small detail the media rarely reports: travel time between hotels and arena, rest days between matches, and the temperature inside the building. At Tokyo 2026, matches were played in heat that many athletes said they had never experienced. One of the answers that permanently changed how I ask questions came from a goalkeeper — at thirty-eight, she said her greatest fear was not losing, but letting her younger teammates walk into a match she knew they did not have the strength for.

I think about that answer every time I read an announcement about another tournament added to the calendar.

A thought to leave behind

Women's volleyball does not need anyone to rescue it; it needs someone willing to look long enough.

Honda Center will fill. The lights will look good. Television will find its angles, and somewhere in the stands a twelve-year-old girl will see a block replayed three times on the big screen, and decide this sport belongs to her.

I do not want that event to fail. I want it to succeed so thoroughly that somebody is forced to pay the price of that success: more matches in decent time slots, more money for women's national teams, more rest days between matches, and a competition system dense enough that an athlete does not have to spend her entire youth on four days of play.

In 2028, when the lights come up in Anaheim, the teams walking onto the floor will be different from those who walked on in 2027. But the way they walk on, the way they are treated, the way they are seen — all of that is being written right now, in a rehearsal room almost nobody is watching.

The only thing I can do is stand on the edge, count the stories allowed on air, and retell the ones left behind.