Vietnamese Women's Volleyball: The Spotlight on the Stars and the Gap Nobody Counts

In the final group-stage match of the national volleyball championship, on the technical bench of a women's team, I counted eleven names sitting still. Among them was a middle blocker, 1.84 metres tall, who had entered the court exactly four times all season, for a total of twenty-three touches of the ball. She warmed up along the sideline for the whole of the third set, clapping her hands in rhythm, her eyes fixed on the net. When the final whistle blew, the coach still had not called her name. No one in the stands noticed. The scoreboard only shows the name of whoever scores. I sat in the seventh row, far enough to see the whole picture, close enough to hear rubber soles gripping the wooden floor. And I remembered a line I once wrote in my notebook: "A name mispronounced three times is still a correct story, if you are willing to listen closely." In Vietnamese women's volleyball, there are many names that have never been read correctly — not because anyone misreads them, but because no one has bothered to read them at all. Over the past five years or so, Vietnamese women's volleyball has lived inside a spiral of unprecedented spotlight. The national team appears regularly at Asian tournaments, improves its position in the International Volleyball Federation world ranking, and for the first time has faces that overseas professional leagues take notice of. Tran Thi Thanh Thuy, the captain and an outside hitter, became a familiar name when she went abroad to play professionally — first in Japan's V.League, then in Turkey's Sultanlar Ligi. Nguyen Thi Bich Tuyen, an opposite hitter, has risen as one of the hardest hitters in the region. Bui Thi Nga, a middle blocker, has worn the national shirt across several generations. That is the tip of the iceberg. Beneath it lies a domestic league system with two phases, a handful of traditional volleyball centres such as Information Command, VTV Binh Dien Long An, Vietinbank and LPBank Ninh Binh, and a reality rarely mentioned: most domestic players never touch the spotlight of the national team. Watching domestic league matches across several seasons, what stays with me is not the powerful spikes of the stars but the distance between two worlds. One world belongs to Thuy, to Bich Tuyen, to matches broadcast live and named in the press. Another world belongs to middle blockers who only enter when a teammate is injured, to reserve liberos, to athletes who train while worrying about their next meal, living on thin wages and patience. I did not come to volleyball from a data-analysis room. I came from a documentary editing suite, where I learned that the real story lives in the frames people intend to cut. Once I spent two weeks in a provincial gym just to record the backstage of a women's team: one player patching her shoes with tape, another wolfing down a boxed meal before the cameras rolled. None of those frames made it into the match report. Yet they are what told me why this sport is still alive, even as the stands grow emptier. The arithmetic is fairly simple. A volleyball match registers fourteen players per team, six on court. Across a domestic season lasting months with dozens of matches, the real playing minutes pile up almost entirely on a small group. In strong teams, the six starters usually play throughout, substituted only for injury or when the score is already settled. That means the bench group — often nearly half the roster — lives on appearances countable on the fingers of one hand. That gap is not just emotional. It is technical. Volleyball is a sport of cohesion, where a good rally depends on three people understanding each other down to the last step. Put a middle blocker on court for the first time after four months on the bench, and you cannot expect her to sync her block with the opposing outside hitter. Double blocking in the modern women's game demands two players moving as one mass, reading the opposing setter's direction in about a quarter of a second. No playing minutes means no chemistry. No chemistry means no playing minutes. The loop locks itself shut. Based on my experience following these matches, I have noticed a paradox that repeats in domestic women's teams. When a team is safe from relegation, the coach still dares not send in a substitute, because every set won affects the standings and his personal reputation. When a team has nothing left to play for, he experiments even less, because there is no motivation. The result is that substitutes are never properly evaluated, and the national team recruits from an ever-narrowing pool. This leads to the problem of squad depth at national level. When the Vietnamese women's team enters a long tournament with two matches in three days, a team's real strength lies not in the six starters but in the seventh and eighth players. That is why major teams around the world rotate constantly, keeping the whole squad ready. In Vietnam, when a pillar such as Tran Thi Thanh Thuy is absent through injury or an overseas schedule, the team often loses part of its attacking system, not merely one hitter. There is a detail I have kept from years of observation: in national-team training, the substitutes often train separately on the other half of the court, playing the role of simulated opponents for the starting six. They take the most punishment, get spiked in the face the most, and are named the least when the match ends. A mature volleyball nation is measured not by the medals of the first team but by whether that simulation group still has enough people to survive year after year. From here the story turns to another variable: foreign imports. In many recent domestic seasons, women's clubs have spent money to bring in overseas hitters, mostly from Cuba, Thailand or countries with more developed volleyball. Professionally, this is clear progress: the quality of rallies rises, fans have a reason to show up, and local players face stronger opponents. Structurally, it is also a harsh test. The problem is that imports usually occupy exactly the position a young local player needs to develop: the main attacking slot. When a club signs a foreign hitter who scores twenty points a match, the coach has little reason to be patient with an eighteen-year-old who needs a whole season to find her rhythm. Foreign players deliver results immediately; local players deliver the future, but the future does not help the team win this Sunday's match. I am not against using imports. The world's leading leagues all do it, and Vietnamese volleyball needs the friction to improve. But there is an unwritten rule every league must ask itself: are imports filling a gap, or sealing a doorway? If a lineup fields three imports and two young locals, that is investment. If a lineup fields three imports while the entire local bench withers in waiting, that is delay disguised as ambition. At regional level, two competitions serve as the bridge between domestic and international play: the SEA V.League and the VTV Cup. The SEA V.League is a regional tournament for Southeast Asian women's national teams, held since 2026 with legs alternating between Vietnam and Thailand. The VTV Cup is an annual international tournament organised by Vietnam Television, staged in provinces such as Ninh Binh, gathering women's teams from inside and outside the region. For many young players, it is their first time facing a foreign opponent. The value of these two tournaments is not the trophy. It is the real playing minutes a substitute accumulates. One set at the VTV Cup against a visiting team can teach a young middle blocker more than a month of dry training. But if the coaching staff keeps the same six starters throughout, that chance disappears, and the tournament becomes merely a showcase. Behind it all is the financial story, which decides who stays in this sport. Women's volleyball in Vietnam does not offer million-dollar contracts. Most players earn wages and bonuses that are just enough to live on, and many must teach or take other jobs to make ends meet. When income is insufficient, the motivation to sit patiently on the bench for several seasons becomes fragile. The best either go abroad, or leave the sport before they ever become famous. The summer the women's team dissolved, I learned that a club does not die on the court, it dies when no one is left to tell its story. I wrote that line a few years ago, when a women's team I was filming dissolved for lack of sponsorship. The team's Brazilian player wept as she left, while her Vietnamese teammates quietly cleared their lockers, with no camera rolling. A club disappearing from the system comes with no sound at all, and that is precisely what makes it most dangerous. Back to the depth problem. In modern volleyball, a strong team is recognised by three hidden indicators: the ability to rotate without losing quality, the ability to change the reception system when the opponent exploits it, and the ability to preserve the attacking structure when the main hitter is blocked. All three depend on the seventh, eighth and ninth players — precisely those on the bench. If you rewatch the matches Vietnam's women's team has lost in decisive sets, you will see a familiar pattern: the reception system wobbles, the setter is forced to push the ball to the wing, and the main hitter is double-blocked again and again. The opponent is not necessarily stronger in power. They simply need a deep enough bench to substitute a server and a blocker, while Vietnam has almost no contingency. That match is decided before the ball is ever served. I once argued about this with a coach. He said that in a league where every match counts for points, he cannot risk throwing a young player into a decisive set. I understand that pressure. But I also wonder: if no one takes a risk for three years, then in the fourth year, where do the young players who are already mature enough not to be a risk come from? Short-term safety and long-term safety pull against each other, and the loser is always the youngest. There is a counter-intuitive angle I want to put on the table. The story usually told is that Vietnamese women's volleyball is rising, and on the surface that is true. But if you look at the structure, that rise is being carried by a few outstanding individuals rather than by a system. When success depends on two or three names, that is not a foundation, it is a beautiful gamble. The second paradox: signing imports, praised as a sign of professionalisation, may be quietly thinning the next generation of local players. A league that looks more glamorous does not mean a volleyball nation that is healthier. There are leagues where match quality rises thanks to outsiders, while the domestic pipeline shrinks for lack of stage time. The third paradox concerns how we measure success. Medal tables and rankings are convenient yardsticks, but they cannot measure bench depth. A volleyball nation can win regional medals for a few years thanks to a golden generation, then slide in the next cycle because no one prepared replacements. We have seen this script in many other sports, and volleyball is not outside the rule. So what should be done? I do not believe in grand solutions. I believe in small, measurable changes. A rule requiring each team to field at least two local players under twenty-two in every set would change coaches' behaviour within a season. A youth setter development programme at provincial level would create a new generation of playmakers within five years. A living allowance for substitute players would keep them around for three more years — exactly the time they need to mature. The empty stands of the pandemic were not silence; they were the echo of those who had once been there. When provincial gyms sit half-empty, it is not a sign that this sport has lost its appeal, but a sign that we have stopped telling the stories that make people want to come. Women's volleyball has plenty of material to tell: young mothers returning to the court after childbirth, players riding the bus three hours to training, female coaches waiting for a chance to lead a big team. Those stories are buried beneath the scoreboard. There is one more paradox I have observed at the media level. When the national team wins, every camera turns to the six on court. When it loses, the first question is why the star did not shine, rather than why we had no plan B. Media shapes memory, and memory shapes how we invest. If we only remember the scorers, we will keep investing only in scorers. In volleyball there is a position that almost never scores and never makes the news: the reserve libero. She stands off court, wears a different coloured shirt, and enters only when the starting libero has a problem. Across a whole season she may touch the ball a handful of times. But precisely because she exists, the starting libero dares to throw herself at every ball, knowing that if she is hurt, the team still has someone. The foundation of courage on court sometimes lies with someone sitting off it. I am not writing this to conclude that Vietnamese women's volleyball is in crisis. On the contrary, I believe this is the best moment to invest in the deeper layers, because the current spotlight is generating resources and attention like never before. The only question is whether we use those resources to buy one successful season, or to build a sustainable decade. Tran Thi Thanh Thuy will one day leave the national shirt. So will Nguyen Thi Bich Tuyen. That is not a tragedy, it is a rule. The tragedy will be the day they leave and we discover the bench is bare — not because there are no people, but because no one ever gave them the chance to grow. A golden generation can hide a weak system for a few years, but it cannot hide it forever. As I left the gym that night, I walked past the warm-up area. The 1.84-metre middle blocker was bending down to collect the leftover balls, stacking them into a basket. She did it alone, under the yellow light. No one took a photo. No one called her name. But if one day she enters the court and blocks a decisive ball, I want to be the one who wrote her name down beforehand. A sports documentary is not there to answer who won, but to ask why people love the game so much. For Vietnamese women's volleyball, that question still hangs over the stands. And the answer, perhaps, is not with the last scorer, but with those still sitting there, waiting for a name to be read correctly. There is one thing I have learned after years in this trade: a sport is measured not by how many stand on the podium, but by how many still want to stay after the podium is cleared. Vietnamese women's volleyball has a chance to redefine that yardstick. If every club would count the names on the bench the way it counts points, then in five years we would have a national team that no longer fears anyone's absence. That is the slow kind of progress, the kind that never makes the front page, but it is the only kind that lasts. And sometimes, the kindest thing a sport can do for a player is to spare her from warming up alone under the yellow light, waiting for a call that never comes.