Vietnamese Volleyball in 2026: A Season Without a Scoreboard

In one of those sessions of sorting through old material, I paused for a long while over three black-and-white photographs. All three showed a dirt volleyball court in northern Vietnam, around 2026. None recorded a location. None named anyone in the frame. On the back of one, a faint pencil line read: “final, dry season.” Those three photographs are almost everything I can touch of a year in which Vietnamese volleyball was played more than anything about it was written down. The rest is blank space. For a sportswriter, blank space is always the most dangerous invitation, because that is where the writer can fill in whatever he wants to believe. In 2026, Vietnam was in one of the harshest years of the war. In the North, the state sports system had taken shape since the late 1950s, with a mass-movement network reaching down to communes, cooperatives, and factories. Under those conditions, volleyball was a sport of unusually stubborn vitality. It needed no level grass field, no heavy equipment: a stretch of packed earth, a rope for a net, and a ball were enough for twelve people. Courts sprang up in schoolyards, village commons, cooperative yards, and even on the open ground at the edge of air-raid shelters. In the South, volleyball had a life of its own too, in schools and in the teams of the military and government agencies, on a quite different tournament rhythm. But 2026 left only scattered traces on both sides, and most of the records are gone. On the world stage, this was the moment volleyball had just entered the ranks of Olympic sports. Since Tokyo 2026, it had been an official event at the Games. By 2026, the FIVB Men's World Cup was held in East Germany, a milestone showing that volleyball had left behind its status as a recreational game to become a sport with its own competition system. That is, just as world volleyball began to be recorded, measured, and ranked, Vietnamese volleyball was playing under conditions in which record-keeping was almost a luxury. What is worth thinking about is this: volleyball survived in Vietnam in 2026 not because it was invested in, but because it was cheap. A rubber ball, a rope, a patch of ground, a cost of nearly nothing. In a sports system worn down by war, that very low demand made volleyball a sport that could be kept going continuously, while many others had to stop. Based on my years of watching volleyball, one technical feature sets the sport apart: the three-touch rule. No individual may touch the ball twice in a row, and each team has only three touches to send it over. That forces every rally to be a chain of coordination, no one able to carry the team alone. In a year when human life was so fragile, a game that required trusting one another through every pass carried meaning far beyond sport. Vietnamese volleyball in 2026 thus took the shape of a mass volleyball, where the line between athlete and spectator was very blurred. People played after work, between two shifts, on afternoons without the sound of engines. And precisely for that reason, looking back, we face a paradox: this may have been the year volleyball was played the most in twentieth-century Vietnamese history, and yet the year it was recorded the least. The data of 2026 is mostly absence. No scores, no lineups, no figures on the number of matches or players. We can only infer from the density of the movement, the number of courts, and the memory of those still living. Data does not lie, but the people who choose the data know very well how to lie. Here, the one who chose was the war: it took away most of the records and left posterity a nearly blank page. There is a strong temptation in writing about this period: to turn it into a heroic story, into “volleyball amid bombs.” That temptation is pleasant, but it obscures a less glamorous reality. The war did not temper Vietnamese volleyball; it took from the sport nearly a decade of systematic development, time that should have been enough to form a national league, train coaches, and build centers. That volleyball survived at all is the achievement of specific people, not of circumstance. Seen from another angle, one could say: precisely because there was no scoreboard, no sponsor, no television, volleyball in 2026 kept something that professional volleyball has since lost, the purity of playing for the sake of playing. But I do not want to stop there. Listening to an empty stadium, I realized that noise was never the audience. A court without stands is not automatically nobler than a court full of spectators; it differs only in that people had no way to choose. The real problem of Vietnamese volleyball in 2026 lay in the lack of record-keepers, not in the lack of glory. A sport without records cannot pass on skills, cannot compare generations, cannot demand resources. And when a sport cannot demand resources, it will continue to be seen as a minor sport, a school sport, rather than a field of national value. The greatest loss of 2026 lies not in any defeat, but in that no one managed to record a victory. Fans do not need a stadium; they need only something to believe in. That is why I write. Half a century after those nameless photographs, a Vietnamese player, Tran Thi Thanh Thuy, went to Japan to play in the V.League for PFU BlueCats, where I sat watching her spike in a gym packed with spectators. The distance from the dirt court of 2026 to that gym cannot be measured in data. It is measured by whether someone, somewhere, took the trouble to write it down. Vietnamese volleyball in 2026 does not need us to embellish it. It only needs us not to forget that it was once played.