The 2.24m Net and Unseen Fates: Vietnamese Volleyball in the Middle of a Major Tournament Season

I sat in the seventh row of the Da Nang Sports Arena on an August afternoon, after all the floodlights had gone out. On the court, only one person remained: a ball girl named Trang, bending down to pick up each ball from the wooden floor and stack them neatly on a cart. Three metres away, the 2.24m net was still taut. I thought: people set the net at 2.24m to limit the height of a spike, yet that same net also measures the height of a human life. How many heads never reach it, and how many spent their entire youth just to jump level with it. In nearly half a century of talking about sport, I have learned one thing: numbers never tell the whole story. A volleyball match lasts two hours and thirty minutes, but to prepare for those two hours and thirty minutes, some people woke up at four in the morning for eleven straight years. And in this major tournament season, as the whole of Vietnam turns its eyes to the women's national volleyball team, I want to write about what television cannot capture. Not the best rallies. But what remains after the ball hits the floor. I still remember the night in 2026 at My Dinh Stadium. I was commentating live on Facebook Live for the national athletics championships. Only two thousand three hundred views. And when Nguyen Thi Oanh broke the national record in the 3,000m steeplechase with 9:52.65, I said something dry: "This is the best performance in history." Viewers switched off mid-stream. That night, my old 80-year-old teacher called me. He said: "You are talking to a phone, not to a person. What does a record mean if you cannot tell how she woke up at four in the morning for eleven years?" Since that night, I swore to myself: every article of mine must begin with a person, not a number. And today, as Vietnamese volleyball enters the home stretch of a major tournament season, I want to begin with another story. There is something outsiders rarely understand about volleyball: it is the only sport in which every point begins with a bare-handed touch of the ball. No gloves, no bat, no racket. Only human skin against a leather ball. Every match is hundreds of those touches. And after every touch, there is a trace. On the wrist, on the forearm, on the fingertips. Bruises that the girls hide under tape. No one sees them. But they are there, like a silent contract between the human being and this sport. In this major tournament season, I have followed Vietnam's women's national volleyball team through almost all their matches in regional and continental competitions. Not as a commentator, but as someone sitting in a dark corner of the arena, taking notes on the smallest details. And what I realised was not what the stat sheet tells you. The stat sheet will tell you that Vietnam's women's team has a spike success rate of around forty-two percent in recent international matches. It will tell you that outside hitter Tran Thi Thanh Thuy, who has played in Japan and Turkey, has the team's highest attack efficiency. It will tell you that setter Nguyen Thi Kim Lien has a stable set count across sets. These numbers are correct. But they tell you nothing about fate. What the stat sheet cannot measure is: how many matches this team has played without a single middle blocker taller than one metre ninety. What the stat sheet cannot measure is: how many training sessions these girls had to jump and spike on legs swollen from training. What the stat sheet cannot measure is: when a spike is blocked, who is the first to run over and pat a teammate on the back. In volleyball, there is a concept that coaches often share among themselves but rarely say outside: "height is not in the legs, it is in the head". What they mean is: a player 1.75m tall can block a player 1.85m tall if she can read the situation before the ball is set. This is one of the most wonderful things about this sport. It does not only measure muscle. It measures intelligence. And in Vietnam, where the average height of women is still far below that of other Asian countries, tactical understanding has become a form of compensation. A compensation that is never easy. I remember the words of a veteran coach whom I will not name. He told me one afternoon in Da Nang: "We cannot teach the girls to grow five centimetres taller. But we can teach them to run five-tenths of a second earlier." That is a sentence I have kept in my notebook for many years. It is a sentence about tactics, but also a sentence about fate. In the modern tactical system of Vietnamese women's volleyball, there is one tactical choice I have watched very carefully this major tournament season: building a style based on speed and flexibility rather than pure height and power. This is a life-or-death decision. It is similar to how a small football team is forced to choose a high-pressing style rather than a low block, because they lack the physique to survive in one-on-one duels. More specifically, when watching Vietnam's women's team in matches against strong opponents such as Thailand, Japan, or the top Asian women's sides, I see a clear pattern. In sets the team wins, the rate of fast attacks at positions three and four is always above average. In sets the team loses, the team begins to shift to wing spikes, going head-on against the opponent's block. This is not a purely technical issue. It is an issue of confidence. When you play fast, you accept risk. Every fast attack demands perfect coordination between the setter and the hitter. A hundredth of a second off, and the ball goes wide. But when it works, it produces points that no block can read. This is why, in modern volleyball, teams that are physically small must pursue speed. Not because they like it, but because they are forced to like it. And here is a point where I want to pause. In football, people often talk about possession as a noble statistic. I have said many times that possession is the most deceptive statistic in sport. There are teams that farm sixty percent possession with meaningless sideways passes, and then lose to a counter-attack. In volleyball, there is a similar statistic: safe ball-retention rate. It is carefully calculated in every report, but it tells you nothing about the ability to score. A team can hold the ball safely ninety percent of a set and still lose twenty-five to twenty. Safety is not victory. Sometimes, safety is the trap. What do I always look for when watching a volleyball match? The moment when a player decides to do something unsafe. The moment when the setter decides to set to position three rather than position four, knowing that if it fails, she will be the one criticised. That is the moment when volleyball becomes a sport of humans, not of machines. I have witnessed such moments this major tournament season. And they do not appear on stat sheets. They appear in the memory of those who sit long enough to see. Now, I want to talk about something I believe is the biggest blind spot in how we evaluate Vietnamese volleyball. It is the obsession with comparing ourselves to the big volleyball nations. Every time Vietnam's women's team loses to Thailand, forums fill with analyses about the lack of physique, about the need to naturalise players, about the need to fundamentally change the youth development system. I am not saying those analyses are wrong. I am saying they lack an important dimension: the dimension of time. Thai women's volleyball built its youth development system in the 1990s. It took nearly thirty years to become the number one force in Southeast Asia. Meanwhile, Vietnamese women's volleyball only began to be properly invested in about fifteen years ago. Comparing two volleyball nations of different ages is an unfair comparison. Not because it is untrue, but because it helps nothing. This is one of the things I call a "tactical blind spot". We look at a defeat and see a technical problem. But the real problem may be a problem of system, of time, of things that cannot be solved by one extra training session. In football, people say that to build a golden generation you need ten years. In volleyball, I believe that number is fifteen. Because volleyball is a sport that demands later physical maturity. A footballer can shine at eighteen. A volleyball player usually has to reach twenty-two or twenty-three to peak physically and tactically. This means a longer development cycle. And if we do not understand this, we will keep demanding quick results that no sustainable development system can deliver. But saying this does not mean I am pessimistic. Quite the opposite. What I want to say is: we are at an important moment. Vietnamese women's volleyball now has a generation of talent unlike any before. Tran Thi Thanh Thuy, with her experience playing abroad, is a model that no one could have imagined ten years ago. Nguyen Thi Bich Tuyen, with her powerful attacking ability, is at the most mature age of her career. And behind them, a generation of young players is growing up in an environment far better than that of previous generations. I had the chance to talk to several young coaches of domestic women's volleyball teams this major tournament season. They told me something I think is important: young players now have better tactical thinking. They understand complex tactical systems at an age when previous generations were still learning the most basic things. This is a sign of progress. And this progress does not come from naturalisation or from institutional change. It comes from coaches having learned to teach better. This is what I want to say about resisting fame. In sport, we are often drawn to the big stars. We talk about the players who score the most points, the most famous coaches. But in volleyball, the most important people are sometimes those who never appear on television. The youth-team coaches who teach twelve-year-olds how to position their hands correctly when blocking. The physiotherapists who spend hours massaging the exhausted shoulders of players after every training session. The cooks in the team kitchens who understand what a player needs to eat before an important match. I call these people "the light behind the stage light". And in this major tournament season, as the whole country turns to the women's team, I want to devote this article to remembering them. There was another afternoon I recorded in my journal. It was 2026, when the COVID pandemic paralysed the V-League and stadiums emptied. I witnessed a young centre-back crying in the corridor of Chi Lang Stadium. His transfer to a big club had collapsed for financial reasons. I stood there, ten metres away, and I could not comfort him. In the nights that followed, I lost sleep. I fell into a state of emotional exhaustion I only understood later. I hid at home and recorded alone: "They say sport is an entertainment industry. But tonight, it is killing people little by little." I tell this story not to complain. I tell it because I believe that sport, at its deepest level, is not about winning. It is about human beings betting their fate on a game in which only one wins. And in that cruel structure, the only thing we can do as spectators is to remember that every player on the court is a person with a life of their own. Someone with an ageing mother back home. Someone with a childhood dream. Someone with a fear she never shares with anyone. I think about this as I watch Vietnam's women's team play this major tournament season. I see young girls, sometimes only nineteen or twenty, standing before thousands of spectators. On their faces is absolute focus. But behind that focus, I know there are stories. Stories that television never tells. There is one thing I learned from the years I spent standing between the track and the stands: a record never belongs to one person alone. When a player spikes successfully, at least five others have worked to create the conditions for that spike. The receiver. The setter. Those who move to pull the opponent's block. And behind them, those who train with them every day. Those whose names never appear on the jersey. This is why I never like how the media covers sport by celebrating individuals. "The brightest star". "Hero of the match". These titles seem harmless. But they hide a basic truth: no team sport is about individuals. And in volleyball, this is especially true. Because you cannot set the ball to yourself. I remember a conversation with a famous former Vietnamese women's volleyball player. She told me something I have never forgotten: "The volleyball court is the only place where I learned that loneliness is a choice, not a fate." She explained: in volleyball, you can choose to play alone, even with five others on the court. You can choose to carry the whole match on your shoulders. And you will lose. Or you can choose to trust your teammates. And you can win. But trust is not something that comes naturally. It is a skill. It is a skill you must practise every day, just like spiking or blocking. This is what I believe is the greatest lesson volleyball can teach us. Not how to jump higher. But how to learn to lean on others. In this major tournament season, as the whole country follows every point, I hope we will remember that. I hope we will see, behind every spike, a human story. Behind every block, a decision of courage. And behind every victory, a collective of people who chose to trust each other. I stayed in the Da Nang arena until the ball girl named Trang pushed the ball cart off the court. She walked past the 2.24m net. She did not jump. She just bowed her head and walked past, as every afternoon. But I knew that in her head there might be a dream. A dream that one day she would jump and touch that net with her fingertips. And I believe that day will come. Not because she can grow ten more centimetres. But because she has spent her whole childhood here, in this arena, with the balls and the net. That is what the stat sheet can never measure. That is what I write about. That is why I still sit down after the lights go out. People switch on stadium lights to watch volleyball; I switch them on to see the hidden corners. And in those hidden corners, I discovered something simple: this sport does not measure a person's height. It measures the depth of a person's heart. The question I want to leave with readers, at the end of this major tournament season, is not how many medals Vietnam's women's team will win. The question is: when you watch a volleyball match, what are you looking at? Are you looking at the numbers on the screen? Or are you looking at the people trying to surpass themselves? Your answer will determine what you see. And in a sport where every point begins with a bare-handed touch, I believe the truest answer is the one that sees the human being first. Tonight, in some arena in Vietnam, a young girl will wake at four in the morning to train. She will not think about medals. She will think about the set she missed in yesterday's match. And she will practise it again, hundreds of times, until it becomes part of her body. That is what the stat sheet can never measure. But that is what a sports journalist should write about. A winter without spectators, yet volleyball remains hot. Only the writer's heart sometimes freezes from excessive empathy. But then, once again, I sit down, open my notebook, and begin to write. Because there are stories that need to be told. And there are people who need to be seen. The 2.24m net still stands there, silent and honest. It does not judge who is tall, who is short. It only tells us: every point has its price. Every dream has its own height. And the only thing we can do is jump, as high as we can, and trust that on the other side of the net, someone will catch us if we fall. The match ends, but the stands still echo in me like a private space. And I remain sitting there, until the last light goes out entirely.