Four Empty Chairs and a Closed Scoreboard: Vietnamese Women's Volleyball in the Regular Season

The match ended at 9:47 p.m. Nearly four hundred people were still standing in the stands of the provincial gymnasium, unwilling to leave before the players walked through the tunnel. Thirty metres away, four chairs had been set out in the press room. Two were occupied: a reporter from the local broadcaster and me. The organisers brought up two athletes. One was an outside hitter who had scored 24 points. The other was a libero who had dug four balls in the fourth set, including one rally where she hit the floor three times in the same spot and still got back up in time.

I counted those four chairs. In fourteen years on the job, I have counted a great many things like them. When every microphone points one way, I choose to stand in the gap.

A season with no medals

The regular season of Vietnamese women's volleyball is a strange thing. There is no SEA Games medal, no Olympic berth, no milestone that journalism would call historic. There is only the first and second phase of the national championship, the VTV Cup, twelve-hour overnight bus rides from Ninh Binh to Long An, and six to eight hundred loyal spectators filling one corner of a stand.

That is precisely why this is the least-watched and most truthful season. With no international ticket hanging in front of them, coaches are forced to experiment. They switch the reception system from three receivers to two. They push an eighteen-year-old onto the court in the third set of a semifinal. They try a left-handed opposite at position two. These matches do not make headlines, but they are where Vietnamese women's volleyball changes shape.

In August 2026 I sat in the Nha Trang arena for a VTV Cup final with more than three thousand spectators. That night I reopened the major sports sites and counted three out of twenty articles about a tournament featuring eight international teams. That is still why I keep sitting in a press room with four chairs. Nobody put me on air, so I went looking for ears that had never been served. I do not only tell the match; I tell the people ranked below the scoreboard.

What has shifted

Across the past two seasons, the clearest change in my notebook is blocking. The top four teams' successful blocks per set have risen from about 1.8 to nearly 2.6. Watching the footage back, it is not because the players jump higher. It is because the blocking system has moved: the two middle blockers no longer wait in a fixed position, they read the setter's shoulder and slide half a beat earlier. Half a beat in women's volleyball is the distance between a hand on the ball and a ball already on the floor.

Alongside that runs a shift in where points come from. For most teams, the opposite is now the scorer. The line-up becomes one star at position two plus two outside hitters whose first job is to keep the ball in the air rather than put it on the floor. Nguyen Thi Bich Tuyen is the clearest example of that load-bearing opposite: her attack attempts in a match are often higher than the two outside hitters' combined. It works, but the tactical consequence is very concrete. When the opposite is read, the team has no second option. The team's attack efficiency drops by roughly seven to ten per cent, and the match starts to drift.

Another signal is the minutes key players spend abroad. Tran Thi Thanh Thuy plays in Japan, and each time she is absent for part of a season, her club often has to rebuild almost the entire attacking system, which in turn forces Nguyen Thi Kim Lien to receive serve across a wider area than usual. Further down the line, a setter like Doan Thi Lam Oanh has to distribute to less experienced hitters, and the team's two-touch rate rises. That is the price of a season with no international ticket: the squad has to find itself again.

The next layer is serving. A safe serve does not lose the point directly, but it puts the opponent's reception system in a comfortable position, which means the setter has all three options. Teams that lose the fourth and fifth sets usually see their service-error rate rise, but the more worrying thing is that the share of serves landing in the opponent's easy zone rises too. They are not losing points directly; they are losing the shape of the match.

Fitness is the last layer. When I log the end time of every rally in the third, fourth and fifth sets across one round, the gap between set one and set four is markedly wider among players under twenty-three than among those over twenty-eight. Young teams hit harder in the first two sets and then lose about a fifth of their approach height. Older teams play slower but hold that height to the end. In a regular season, that is the whole story of a semifinal.

Where I disagree

The popular telling is that foreign imports raise the level of the league. Visually, true. Systemically, I am not sure.

A foreign contract at the opposite position immediately solves a small club's scoring problem for one season. It also takes away exactly the minutes a nineteen-year-old needs to learn how to face a double block. Every transfer is a parting signed in ink, and in this case the one parting is usually the young player at the end of the bench, the one with no say in the decision. The transfer race in Vietnamese women's volleyball is largely a brand race between big clubs. But the contract genuinely worth something in this sport belongs to a small club signing a seventeen-year-old middle blocker, developing her for four years, and losing her to a big club without fair compensation.

Seen from another angle, I notice how the arguments move. The challenge system was expected to reduce disputes on court. In practice, it moves the dispute from centre court into the review room. The question of whether the ball touched a hand or the floor becomes a question about camera angle and about what counts as enough evidence to overturn. The referee is no longer the only person under pressure; there is now a big screen and six thousand people looking at three slow-motion frames. The argument does not disappear. It only changes rooms.

What remains

I do not know which of those four empty chairs in the press room will one day be filled. But I know the regular season is where the national team of three years from now is written, in lines of notes nobody in the press room thought to turn back to.