Honda Center and the Olympic 2028 Dress Rehearsal: Anaheim Becomes Volleyball's Laboratory

Across 36 years of observing the sports industry, I have drawn one uncomfortable rule: the announcements dismissed as "logistics" are usually where the biggest story hides. When the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic organizers confirmed that the Honda Center in Anaheim, California would host indoor volleyball, most Vietnamese fans skimmed past. An ice hockey arena, nearly 50 kilometres south of downtown Los Angeles. Read that way, there is nothing to see.

But one detail was missed. One year before the Olympic flame is lit, that same arena will be put into operation as a large-scale dress rehearsal for volleyball. This is the crux. Nobody builds an arena to make an Olympics. They turn an arena into an Olympics in advance, by letting it "run" under real conditions.

A rebel is not afraid of being wrong, only of being like everyone else. And choosing an ice hockey rink in Anaheim as an Olympic volleyball venue is exactly the kind of decision a safe crowd would never dare make.

I have stood in the corridors of many large arenas and realised something not everyone notices: volleyball is not only played on the floor, it is played in space. The crack of a spike, a successful block, a service ace — all are affected by whether the crowd sits close or far, whether the roof is high or low, where the lights shine from. That is why the rehearsal stage of an Olympic venue matters more than its appearance. And that is why I chose to write about this subject instead of a match currently burning up the newsfeed.

If you have followed world volleyball long enough, you know the gap between a successful tournament and a disaster is not about competitive quality. It is about logistics. A slippery floor from humidity, a lighting system that blinds an outside hitter, a ball-retrieval lane jammed mid-set — these can wreck a final before anyone reacts. At an Olympics, mistakes are multiplied many times over by scale and pressure.

The Honda Center is a choice worth analysing on three layers. The first is infrastructure. This arena is among the most modern facilities in Southern California, serving the Anaheim Ducks of the NHL. Its capacity ranges around 17,000 to 18,000 seats depending on event configuration. For an indoor sport like volleyball, that is a large stage. More importantly, this venue has been operated for hundreds of nights a year across a variety of sports and entertainment events. Deep operational experience is an asset not every newly built arena possesses.

The second layer is geography. Anaheim sits in Orange County, separated from downtown Los Angeles by a considerable distance. Placing indoor volleyball here rather than downtown is a dispersal choice. Fans who want to watch Olympic volleyball will have to travel further, stay longer, spend more. This is the equation every Olympic organiser must weigh: centralise to save operating costs, or disperse to take advantage of existing facilities.

The third layer, and the one most worth discussing, is rehearsal. According to the plan, one year before the Olympics begin, the Honda Center will be used as a rehearsal environment for volleyball. Read this detail carefully. "Rehearsal" does not mean a small drill with a few staff. In organiser language, it usually means a real event, with real spectators, real broadcasting, real athletes — all running on exactly the floor that will be used at the Olympics.

Why does this matter so much? Because volleyball is among the sports most sensitive to the competition environment. Over many years of observation, I have recorded times when the floor itself became the deciding variable. Ball bounce depends on the surface coating. Shoe grip depends on temperature and indoor humidity. Athlete visibility depends on how lights are arranged and what sits behind the net. A high roof can create convection currents that affect the trajectory of a floating serve.

At VNL tournaments I have followed, I have seen excellent hitters fault repeatedly on serve because the floodlights reflected off the far stand behind them. It was not a loss of form. It was that they could not see the landing point of the ball. A genuine dress rehearsal will find and fix such faults before they appear in a gold-medal match with the whole world watching.

For Vietnamese fans, this story is not distant at all. Vietnamese volleyball has ambitions to reach continental and world stages. The women's national team has appeared several times at Asian tournaments, and the long-term goal is to compete on bigger platforms. Every time the team travels abroad, adapting to courts and conditions is always part of the story. So how a major volleyball nation prepares a key venue is a lesson worth revisiting.

The crowd is never wrong, but it never writes history either. That the public sees a logistics line and skips it is understandable. That someone in my profession sees a strategic gamble there is something I must name.

Now to the core. I break the Anaheim gamble into three problems the 2028 organisers must solve, and I will say plainly which is hardest.

The first problem is conversion of function. The Honda Center was designed for ice hockey. The rink has its dimensions and a cooling system beneath the floor. When switched to volleyball, the entire ice layer must be covered, and a temporary floor system erected on top. This surface must meet international federation standards for bounce and friction. A small error here is enough for athletes to feel the difference, and in elite volleyball, feeling a difference means losing points.

The second problem is the crowd. A hockey arena has a shape and seat distribution optimised for a long rectangular rink. An indoor volleyball court is much smaller and placed centrally. This creates viewing angles where fans behind the two ends may have their sightlines offset compared with those on the sides. In volleyball, where every rally unfolds in a narrow, fast space, the angle determines the experience. Organisers will have to recalculate seating, screens and lighting so every fan gets a good enough experience.

The third problem, and the hardest, is broadcasting and scheduling. Indoor volleyball at the Olympics includes both men and women, runs over many days, with a large number of matches. A single court must carry all group-stage matches through to the final. That schedule demands the ability to restore the floor between matches, to reconfigure for broadcasts in different time zones, and to coordinate with hundreds of television personnel.

This is where the rehearsal delivers its greatest value. A hockey arena has run hundreds of nights for diverse events, but has never run a multi-day volleyball match sequence with the high repetition of an Olympics. That is precisely why a rehearsal one year out, with spectators and broadcasting, will expose problems no blueprint can predict.

I want to be clear about what I am thinking here. Choosing the Honda Center as an Olympic volleyball venue is not a risky move because the arena is weak. It is a calculated move because the arena already has an operational rhythm. The difference lies in whether organisers have the courage to run it under real conditions before the world watches. And by what has been announced, they chose yes.

Age 52 taught me that a hot take is not recklessness, but daring to see one set further ahead. Here, "one set further" means looking from 2026 to 2028, and realising that most of the Olympic volleyball story will be written in Anaheim, not in Los Angeles.

Now to the part where I challenge myself. Where could I be wrong?

First, I assume the pre-Olympic rehearsal will be at a scale comparable to a real tournament. This assumption rests on how recent organisers run test events, but nothing guarantees it absolutely. The rehearsal may run at a smaller scale, with fewer spectators, and some problems will only surface when the real Olympics begin. If so, the "rehearsal" advantage shrinks considerably.

Second, I rate highly the role of serve and roof in indoor volleyball. This is true by my experience, but I have no specific measurement data on airflow inside the Honda Center. In an arena with modern air conditioning and ventilation, the effect of airflow may be far smaller than what I imagine from older arenas elsewhere.

Third, and this is what makes me pause most, dispersing venues to Anaheim may be seen as reducing the overall Olympic experience. Volleyball is separated from the centre, fans must travel far, and the connectivity of a global sports event is fragmented. If fans complain about distance, then an arena strong on logistics can still become a minus on experience. I may be wrong to put infrastructure above the human factor.

The frozen football season of 2026 did not take away the ball, it gave back the reason to love football. That pandemic taught me that what seems immutable can change, and sports organisations are forced to prepare better for the future. How the 2028 Olympic organisers handle the Honda Center will be a test of how far they have learned that lesson.

There is one more aspect I want to give space to. In women's volleyball, global attention is rising markedly. National leagues are increasingly professional, pay is better, and competition is fiercer. A carefully prepared Olympic venue will further highlight the quality of women's volleyball, the discipline I believe will deliver the most memorable moments at Los Angeles 2028.

I was once criticised as a "destroyer of the youth football ecosystem" for daring to question a philosophy many loved. But those very moments taught me that truth must be spoken, even when it is unwelcome. With the Honda Center, what I want to make clear is this: the quality of an Olympic volleyball tournament will not be decided in the final, but in those quiet weeks of testing before it. If the infrastructure is checked carefully, the stage will be good enough for athletes to shine. If not, the world will see faults at exactly the wrong moment.

Volleyball is a sport where most fans see only the visible part. They see the spike, the dig, the moment the home team wins a deciding point. They do not see the technical staff adjusting the floor at three in the morning, the lighting engineers tuning each bulb, the people measuring indoor humidity to ensure the ball flies correctly. But those invisible things create the stage for the visible moments.

Choosing the Honda Center and using it as a laboratory is a way of acknowledging that invisible details matter. An arena does not become an Olympic venue by itself. It becomes one because someone took the trouble to test it, measure it, fix it. That is work no one applauds. But it is the work that decides.

Looking ahead, I believe future Olympics will rely more and more on existing venues rather than building from scratch. This trend comes from cost, from sustainability pressure, and from experience showing that hastily built arenas leave legacies nobody uses. Volleyball, with its need for an indoor court of moderate capacity, sits in an ideal position to exploit this model. Anaheim could become a template for how cities choose and prepare venues in the future.

For Vietnamese volleyball, I think the lesson is not about imitating scale. It is about attitude. When a major event comes, do we dare spend time rehearsing real conditions, or do we simply trust blueprints and schedules? Vietnamese volleyball may not host an Olympics, but we can host domestic and regional tournaments more professionally if we care about infrastructure as much as results.

I did not write this piece to praise organisers. I wrote it to point out that a decision seen as logistics is a strategic decision, and those who care about volleyball should follow it. One year before the torch is lit, we will have the answer to the question: can an ice hockey rink become a worthy home for Olympic volleyball?

Between 2026 and 2028, everyone will look toward downtown Los Angeles. I will look toward Anaheim. There, on a temporary floor erected over a covered ice sheet, athletes will strike the ball unaware of how many people quietly prepared so that strike could happen exactly as it needed to.

Elite volleyball is a sport of detail. One breath, one footstep, one wrist angle can split a match in two. And the biggest detail of all, for an Olympics, often lies outside the audience's view — in rehearsals no one reports, on floors no one remembers the name of, in arenas seemingly chosen by accident. Anaheim is one of those names. And in my way, I will name it before everyone else is forced to acknowledge it.