Honda Center and the 2028 Olympic Rehearsal: Women's Volleyball Picks Anaheim as Its Laboratory

There was a small detail I noted in my notebook when I read the announcement: Honda Center in Anaheim would open its doors for a major international women's volleyball tournament, and the organizers called it a "rehearsal" for the 2028 Olympics. Not a friendly. Not an exhibition. A real round of competition, with ranking points, with Olympic qualification stakes, held in the very arena that would host four years later.

I sat for a long time with those words. At fifty-eight, after forty-two years behind a microphone, I have learned that administrative announcements usually carry more than they say. An arena that is chosen is not just a venue. It is a statement about who will be seen, who will be broadcast, and who will be left behind the curtain. An arena is a statement of value, not a line on a map.

Honda Center sits in Anaheim, about seventy kilometers south of downtown Los Angeles, with more than eighteen thousand seats, once the home of the Anaheim Ducks and host to countless concert nights. It is not a dedicated volleyball arena. It is a multi-purpose arena built to the scale of North American entertainment. When LA28 decided to place volleyball there rather than in a smaller city venue, they made a model choice, not a purely sporting one.

The first thing to clarify: this is not a new tournament invented to serve the Olympics. It is an established international competition with accumulated ranking points and an Olympic qualification mechanism running through both group play and world ranking. Holding it at Honda Center turns the place into a living laboratory: organizers can measure audience flow, test lighting systems that suit broadcast cameras, rehearse a schedule of multiple matches per day, and — most importantly — teach a local operations crew a sport that has never been mass-popular here.

I have watched many of these arena launch events. In 2026, at the Women's Asian Cup in Jordan, I saw organizers install a new camera system and accidentally lose the low angle — the very angle I use to read a player's footwork before a shot. A rehearsal is never only a question of logistics. It is a question of who decides what the audience will see. Tokyo left me behind, and in that turn I found tactics.

Back to Anaheim. The organizers announced a format with a group stage concentrated over a short window, followed by knockout rounds, with broadcast windows spread across multiple time zones to reach different audiences. On one hand, this is a clear sign that women's volleyball is treated as a television product, no longer the "attached" discipline of an Olympic cycle. On the other, that time-zone calculation creates a familiar problem I have watched for four decades: smaller teams get pushed into dead slots to make room for the marquee matches.

The Olympic qualification mechanism is the part I want to dwell on longest. With a tournament held one year before the Games, every ranking point carries a different weight depending on the coefficient of the event. This forces national federations to strategize: send the strongest roster to collect points, or rest key players for tournaments closer to the Olympics. In Japan, where I work, we have seen seasons where coaches had to hold back a wing spiker for qualifiers instead of a low-value friendly. That decision always draws criticism, but it is structurally correct.

I don't count matches. I count the stories allowed on air.

What I find notable is that Anaheim was not chosen because it has a women's volleyball tradition. There is no local professional women's club scene at a comparable level. What Anaheim has is: internationally compliant multi-purpose infrastructure, large transport systems, and a broadcast market where English is the primary language. In other words, the selection criterion wasn't "where women's volleyball is strongest," but "where women's volleyball can sell the most seats."

That is a shift I recognized years ago. In the 1990s, when I began working in Nagoya on volleyball segments, people still debated whether Japanese women's volleyball needed prime-time broadcast slots. Thirty years later, the question has reversed: now people ask whether women's volleyball can fill eighteen thousand seats in California. That reversal did not come from a single tournament. It came from an economic structure that has changed.

I want to look at that structure more concretely. When a women's volleyball tournament is staged in a North American arena the size of Honda Center, organizers must solve three problems at once: sell tickets, sell broadcast rights, and run a professional competition system within a short window. Those three problems are tightly linked. If tickets sell slowly, the arena looks empty, the broadcast image loses gravity, and the rights value for the next Olympic cycle suffers. If the schedule is too dense, competitive quality drops, and the strongest teams may choose not to fully participate.

In practice, it is the strongest teams that decide whether a rehearsal succeeds. A tournament in Anaheim can have the most beautiful stage, but if Italy, Serbia, Brazil, and Türkiye don't bring their strongest rosters, American audiences will see a second-tier product. And a second-tier product staged in a first-tier arena is a far worse signal than staging it in a small arena. At fifty-eight, I no longer remember the score; I remember the face of the scorer.

There is one technical aspect I consider most important in this whole story, and it is often overlooked when people discuss venue selection: the reception system of an arena directly affects defensive and serving quality. Ceiling lighting, the distance from stands to the sideline, the height of the ceiling relative to a serve's trajectory — all of them affect whether a libero can read the ball early.

I once witnessed a tournament in Asia where lighting running along the stands made powerful serves harder to read than usual. Teams with experienced liberos adapted quickly; younger teams collapsed in the first two sets. The result was a tournament where the successful reception rate was systematically skewed between teams. No one called it unfair, but it was unfair. And in a rehearsal tournament for the Olympics, that kind of structural unfairness will be multiplied four years later if it is not recorded now.

Anaheim will teach organizers that. Or they will learn nothing at all.

I believe there are three sets of questions a rehearsal must answer, and only two are publicly discussed by organizers.

The first set is operational: how long does it take an audience to enter, does the sound system interfere with referee signals, does the schedule allow enough rest between sets for athletes to recover under air conditioning. This set is discussed most because it is easy to measure.

The second set is broadcast: image quality from different camera angles, whether the sound of shoes on a wooden floor carries, and — more important than any of that — how a television channel tells the story of a national team the local audience has never heard of. This set is less discussed because it touches editorial power.

The third set, the one not discussed, is sporting: whether a multi-purpose arena can create a fair competitive environment for every team, and whether the Olympic qualification mechanism accidentally turns this tournament into a mutual elimination contest between federations with different financial capacities.

I want to say more about the third set. Olympic qualification through world ranking has a side effect few analyze: it rewards federations capable of staging many international matches in a single year. A European national team can play thirty international matches a year thanks to a dense continental calendar. An Asian team may only play fifteen with equivalent quality. On points, this gap is offset by tournament coefficients. But on experience at the highest level, the gap remains.

When a tournament is staged in the United States and counts as part of the qualification chain, it adds another variable for Asian teams. They must travel farther, adapt to time zones, and compete under a different audience system. That is not a reason to complain. It is a reason to prepare better. But it is a structural fact I want federations to register when they plan for the coming year.

What makes me think hardest is the phrase "rehearsal." A rehearsal for whom? For the Olympics, yes. But also a rehearsal for a commercial model women's volleyball has never experienced at this scale on American soil. When I was young, Asian women's volleyball was known through indoor tournaments with a few thousand devoted spectators. Now a similar tournament can be placed in an eighteen-thousand-seat arena and measured by revenue.

That shift carries a paradox. Commercial respect arrives before sporting respect. Sponsors care about audience numbers before they care about competitive quality. Broadcasters care about time slots before they care about narrative. And national federations, whether they want to or not, must play by the rules of cash flow.

But I don't want this piece to end as a lament. Because one thing is truly changing, and it is changing in a good direction.

Twenty years ago, an Asian women's volleyball athlete who wanted to be known in the North American market had to sacrifice a great deal to play in a U.S. college program, often unpaid, often away from family for years. Now an international tournament with an Olympic-standard stage can put those athletes on American television within a single week. That difference is not small. It is the difference between existing and being seen.

I think of the Norwegian journalist I once met at a semifinal in Jordan. She told me the hardest part of covering women's soccer is not finding stories — it is convincing editors to put those stories on the front page. "We don't lack material," she said. "We lack a place to stand." I think that applies to women's volleyball in North America, and perhaps more than ever when an eighteen-thousand-seat arena opens its doors to female athletes in Anaheim.

Women's volleyball does not need rescue; it needs someone willing to watch long enough. And a rehearsal is a chance to watch long enough before the crowds arrive.

I don't know how the final outcome of that rehearsal will look. I won't be in Anaheim for those days. But I know one thing: anyone in the organizing committee who thinks this is just an administrative procedure should sit down together and rewatch the low-angle camera from an Olympic women's volleyball final. They will see something no stat sheet records. They will see how a small libero stands in the middle of a giant arena and keeps her team upright.

That is what every rehearsal must serve. Not organizers. Not sponsors. That libero.

When women's volleyball arrives in Anaheim, it brings a question other sports have tried to answer for decades: can respect be bought with a ticket. The answer, from my experience, is: no. Respect comes from whom the arena was built for, and who is allowed to walk in. Honda Center will tell us the answer in the next few years.

As for me, I will keep writing small lines in my notebook. Lines no one may read. But someday, when a young coach stands before an eighteen-thousand-seat arena and wonders whether she has a place to stand, I want that notebook to tell her this: a place to stand is not granted. It is earned by staying upright through every ball.