Honda Center and the dress rehearsal one year before the 2028 Olympics

An arena with more than 17,000 seats in Anaheim, California, will serve as a rehearsal venue for volleyball ahead of the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic Games, exactly one year before the Olympic flame is lit. Honda Center is no stranger to American sports audiences: it is the home of the Anaheim Ducks in the National Hockey League, where the ice sheet is swapped for a playing surface and the lighting system is reprogrammed for an entirely different sport.

What interests me is the verb: rehearsal.

In the technical file of an Olympic Games, that is the phase when organisers test everything that can be tested — the flow of athletes from the warm-up area to the court, the time it takes for lighting to switch states between sets, the position of the camera in the corner behind the sideline, the bus ride from the team hotel to gate number 3. None of those lines mention the technique of a spike. Yet all of them decide whether a spike is seen at all.

I have held this view since 2026, when I was a young reporter in Shanghai. Back then I thought I was writing about tactics. Later I understood I was writing about the system that allows tactics to exist.

Volleyball is won or lost in logistics

Every Olympic cycle leaves a lesson about the arena. Maracanãzinho at Rio 2026 was a renovated old hall with roughly 12,000 seats, and Rio's humid heat turned athletes' hydration levels into a medical issue rather than a technical one. Ariake Arena at Tokyo 2026 was purpose-built with a high ceiling, but it opened without spectators. South Paris Arena 1 at Paris 2026 had to share its schedule with several other sports in the same complex.

Honda Center belongs to a fourth category: a working professional arena, borrowed for a short elite event.

The difference lies in the fact that a hockey arena is designed for the eye to track a small object moving fast on a horizontal plane. Volleyball lives in the vertical dimension. The ball rises to the peak of the attack and then drops through the space above the net — a space that lighting rigs, speaker arrays and LED boards in a hockey arena normally occupy.

International technical rules require at least 12.5 metres of clearance above the court for top-level competition, a playing court of 18 by 9 metres, and a free zone of 5 to 6.5 metres on each side. For television, required illumination usually sits between 1,000 and 1,500 lux, evenly spread across the surface. The airspace above the net is volleyball's technical asset, and it is not negotiable.

I once stood in a European arena where the lighting rig hung several metres below standard. Two women's teams played three sets in a completely different psychological state: they played safer balls, attacked with less than full jump height, and their service error rate rose noticeably. No coach mentioned it in the press conference. But the footage kept enough of a record.

A rehearsal venue has value precisely here: it allows you to find ceiling errors before they become scoreline errors.

Broadcast windows and the Asian market

Pacific Time runs 14 hours behind Vietnam in summer. A match starting at 19:00 local time in Anaheim lands at 9:00 the next morning in Hanoi. For anyone working in news, that is one of the best slots an Olympic Games on American soil can offer: morning in Asia, prime time in North America, and just enough of a gap for editors on both sides to work in parallel.

But a good slot only has value if it is scheduled in advance. Olympic organisers usually build the calendar along two axes: the host broadcaster's prime time and the athletes' minimum recovery time. Those two axes rarely align. Women's volleyball has a high average set count — four sets or more is routine in the knockout rounds — so the time window allotted to each match is often pushed right to the limit.

I went back through recent Olympic schedules and found a consistent pattern: semi-finalists usually get fewer than 20 hours of rest between matches. For a sport that demands repeated high-intensity jumping, 20 hours is just enough to recover muscle, not enough to recover the nervous system. A rehearsal venue is the chance to measure that number precisely instead of guessing it.

Between fast news and accurate news, I choose accurate news even if it means sitting longer.

Olympic qualification and the value of a dry run

Volleyball's Olympic qualification mechanism has changed across cycles, but it always revolves around three sources: continental championship results, world championship results and the world ranking. That turns every international event in an Olympic cycle into part of the same calculation.

An event at Honda Center one year before the Games is therefore not just an event. It is a data point.

For Asian women's teams, this is a rare window. Japan, China, Thailand and Vietnam are all rebuilding at different speeds. Vietnam qualified for the Nations League for the first time after winning the 2026 Challenger Cup, and that marked a turning point in scheduling: the Vietnamese women's team moved from regional tournaments to facing the world's top sides with far greater frequency.

My experience watching matches tells me the gap between a team ranked 30th and a team ranked 10th is not about individual technique. It is about the ability to repeat a good rally in the fourth set, when the heart rate has hit 170 and the arena is loud. To train for that, a team needs to play in big arenas, against big opponents, with logistics built to Olympic standard. A rehearsal in Anaheim is part of that process.

At Paris 2026, the women's volleyball final between Italy and the United States ended in three sets, giving Italy its first Olympic gold. Paola Egonu became a face on the front pages of newspapers that do not cover sport as a specialism. At Tokyo 2026, the United States beat Brazil 3-0 in the final. At Rio 2026, China beat Serbia 3-1.

Paola Egonu deserves her own analysis. She is not the kind of athlete mainstream media normally champions, and precisely for that reason, her emergence as the face of an Olympic final shows that the commercial value of women's volleyball is being decided by quality of play more than by communications strategy. That is a good signal. It also sets a requirement: if quality of play is the main asset, the infrastructure serving that quality has to match.

Three recent finals, three different champions, three different regions. That is a marker of the competitive depth of women's volleyball at national-team level. But it does not automatically translate into matching commercial value, and most of the gap sits in distribution: how many matches are broadcast live, in which time slots, to which markets.

Honda Center, used properly, becomes one link in that chain. A 17,000-seat arena in Southern California can sell tickets for an international women's volleyball match, broadcast live to Asia in the morning, and generate an operational dataset detailed enough for the 2028 organisers to know what they are actually preparing for.

The decisive question is not whether Honda Center has enough seats. It is whether the organisers treat women's volleyball as a headline sport or as schedule filler.

The contrarian angle

Here I have to say plainly what the event operations world tends to avoid: arenas are not neutral.

When a tournament is designed primarily to collect operational data, the centre of gravity shifts from the people competing to the process. The schedule is built for cameras. The interview area is placed for the broadcast flow. Ticket prices are modelled on hockey revenue. And once everything runs smoothly, the final question is asked: how much of the value created flows back into the sport itself?

I have seen this pattern in many places, not only volleyball. European football's pre-season tours are staged in Asia and North America under the label of market development, while clubs fly home with three muscle injuries and a disrupted training calendar. The stadiums are full. The balance sheet looks good. The sport receives nothing but a performance.

Women's volleyball has an advantage here over men's football: it has not yet been exploited to exhaustion. But for that very reason, it is easy to treat as an emerging market for experimentation.

I am not against staging a test. I am against testing without publishing results. If a rehearsal venue is used to measure, the measured data must be returned to federations, to national teams, to the people who gave up a week of training to fill a slot in someone's dry run.

An empty arena exposes every artificial sound.

What is changing

Los Angeles 2028 will be the fourth consecutive Olympic Games in which women's volleyball features as one of the strongest in-venue draws. Honda Center is the opportunity for organisers to prove they understand that with a concrete decision: an arena with the right scale, a time slot with the right reach, a dataset with the right transparency.

If the rehearsal only checks whether the sound system works, it is a technical drill. If it is used to answer a bigger question — what women's volleyball needs to become a flagship sport at an Olympic Games on American soil — then it is a milestone.

They call me a female journalist; I just want to be a journalist who gets it right. In this case, getting it right means waiting until the arena doors open, measuring every metre of clearance above the net, reading every slot on the schedule, and only then drawing a conclusion.

I believe in data, but I believe more in the person willing to put it on the front page.