Three Out of Twenty: The Gap Where Vietnamese Women's Volleyball Should Be

The 2026 VTV Cup final in Nha Trang had no empty seats. Behind me sat a group of high-school students holding hand-painted banners; in the opposite corner, a few older men who had arrived before the doors opened. I sat in the press area along the sideline, notebook in hand, doing something that later became a professional reflex: I counted. Spectators. Teams on the scoreboard. Cameras pointed at the court. Three days later I reopened every major sports outlet and counted a fourth time — the count that left me sitting silently in front of a screen.

Twenty articles about a tournament that brought together eight international teams. Three of them were about women's volleyball.

The other seventeen were about men's football, about a league fixture, about a transfer, or simply about a national-team training session. I was not angry. I only wrote it down. But the moment of three out of twenty — quiet, tidy — was enough to redirect an entire career.

That year I was a final-year broadcasting student. I wrote a short analysis titled "Why is women's volleyball forgotten?" on a personal blog, unedited, uncommissioned. Forty-eight hours later it had 2,500 reads. For a student who had never had anything circulate, that was strange. Stranger still was what stuck with me afterwards: nobody argued with my thesis. People asked where I got my numbers.

That is when I understood the job. In women's sport, an exclamation has no weight. A count does.

Most sports desks do not lack goodwill toward women's volleyball. What they lack is a concrete reason to open the page. Men's football supplies that reason daily: scores, tables, a transfer market, refereeing disputes, dressing-room drama. Women's volleyball supplies something far harder to sell — it supplies quality of play. And quality of play, in the economics of a newsroom, is not a product. It is a cost.

I say this not to accuse anyone. I have sat in editorial meetings. I know how an editor has to choose between two stories on the same afternoon: a men's football match with three million views and a women's volleyball match with three thousand people in the hall. Neither decision is professionally wrong. The problem is that only one of the two options exists in the decision-maker's head. So I started counting — not to indict, but to create data that did not previously exist.

During the 2026 World Cup in Russia, the whole intern desk chased two names. I was assigned to filter copy, a boring task that gave me permission to read everything. I found a detail I had never seen anyone write: the tournament used fifty-four male referees and not a single female referee — in ninety-two years of history. I proposed a four-part series, "Women at the World Cup: Where Are They?", about women working in football worldwide: assistant referees, team doctors, media officers, federation executives. It reached 10,000 reads, the desk's highest of the month. My editor recognised my direction for the first time, and that is why I was offered a contract after graduating.

But the lesson I kept was not about success. It was about bridges.

I cannot pull readers toward women's volleyball by saying it matters. I can only pull them with an event they already care about, then stand there and point to the side. The men's World Cup is a bridge. Men's football is a bridge. The VTV Cup, with eight international teams and a full arena, is also a bridge — but nobody had bothered to build it.

In the men's World Cup I counted women appearing — fewer than the number of goals. That was not a conclusion. It was an opening line, and I spent four instalments answering it.

In 2026, when COVID-19 postponed Vietnam's women's Olympic qualifiers three times and every studio stood empty, I was a new employee with no column and no team. I produced a podcast called "Góc nhìn nữ" — twelve episodes about players who had been forgotten, including Huỳnh Như, who by then had scored more than fifty goals for the national team and still had no long-form portrait worthy of her. Three months later each episode hit 5,000 listens. The content director noticed and gave me the right to propose my own segment. That shift turned me from a copy-taker into a storyteller.

When the world shut its doors, podcasts opened an auditorium. What I learned was not in the number 5,000. It was that when the stadium closes, another stand already exists, waiting for someone to switch on a microphone.

Now the hardest part.

For years I told myself that the problem with Vietnamese women's volleyball was visibility. Too few articles, too few images, too few microphones. Add articles, add images, add microphones, and everything would be fine. I believed that for a long time. Then I began testing my own assumptions and found three holes.

The first is a denominator error. Having counted three out of twenty articles, I nearly concluded immediately that the tournament had been abandoned. But I had not asked a basic question: of those twenty, how many were commissioned by the organiser, how many a reporter produced independently, and how many were translations of foreign sources? Those three numbers tell three completely different stories. If most men's football coverage arrives pre-packaged — statements, press conferences, open data — then the issue is not that women's volleyball is disliked. The issue is that covering it costs more. A reporter has to travel, film, understand the rules, and tell a positional fault apart from a ball touch. Nobody pays for that work unless it produces proportionate traffic.

The second is an attribution error. I once wrote that audiences did not care about women's volleyball. But three thousand people filling an arena in Nha Trang directly contradicts that. The audience was there. They bought tickets, arrived early, stayed to the last applause. What was missing was the intermediary system: distributors, narrators, people who turn one evening into a story capable of spreading. The absence of the intermediary was misread as the absence of demand.

The third is an idealisation error. When you have stood for something mistreated for years, it is easy to write about it in only two colours: glory and tragedy. I have written such sentences. I have written about women's volleyball as if every match were a spiritual rite, and I ignored the unlovely parts: shanked passes in the fifth set, poor substitutions, months of late wages, players taking second jobs mid-season. If I cannot write those things, I am writing advertising, not journalism.

A sport told only in two colours — glory and tragedy — will never have grown-up readers. And grown-up readers are what Vietnamese women's volleyball needs more than any compliment.

So I changed my method. I still count. But I count things nobody wants to count. I count how often a reporter is in the hall from warm-up. I count questions put to female athletes at a press conference versus those put to coaches. I count how much of a TV bulletin is actually given to play, after subtracting the lead-in and the commercials. These three counts share one trait: they do not measure public affection for women's volleyball. They measure how much work a newsroom is willing to spend.

And a pattern emerged that I believe is central. Vietnamese women's volleyball does not lack results. It lacks people who read results correctly. A win at a regional tournament does not automatically become news. It becomes news when someone places it in a storyline with a past, expectations and consequences. Men's football has had that storyline for so long that a training session is enough to make a bulletin. Women's volleyball must build that storyline match by match, and nobody is paid for that part of the job.

That is why I moved from news to portraits. News answers "what happened". Portraits answer "what it means". Women's volleyball has enough material for the second question, but almost all the journalism devoted to it stops at the first — mechanically: score, lineup, and a conclusion borrowed from the previous match.

I do not only tell the match; I tell about the people ranked below the scoreboard. For years that was the sentence I reminded myself of before every draft. Then I realised it was still not enough. Telling about someone ranked below the scoreboard still lets the scoreboard set the running order. I needed something else: to write as if the scoreboard had never been ranked at all.

I started in 2026 at a newly founded paper where every process was being written from scratch. It was a harsh beginning and the greatest gift: I never inherited old newsroom habits, so I had to invent a method. I spent about five years hosting and producing a late-night volleyball programme. Sitting on both sides — the voice and the commissioner — taught me something I have never read anywhere: most women's sports content is lost not in editing but in idea generation. When an idea is never pitched, it is not cut. It simply does not exist, and its absence provokes no argument in any meeting.

That is why I always write from a specific detail. A specific training session. A specific moment. A specific sentence. Not because I like small details, but because a small detail is the only evidence an overlooked idea can use to defend itself.

Now a view I know will irritate some people.

There is an assumption running under a great deal of writing about women's sport, including decent writing: that its value lies in its social value. That it matters because it inspires, because it breaks stereotypes, because it gives girls a role model. All true. But there is a side effect rarely named: it turns a competition into a campaign. When you justify a tournament by its social value, you quietly concede that its competitive value cannot stand on its own. And nobody pays rights fees for a campaign.

This is the biggest blind spot in Vietnamese women's sports media, and it runs directly against another trend I have watched for years: the money in women's sport does not flow where the public thinks. Transfer races between big clubs are brand arms races — they buy attention and pay for attention, not for victories. The genuinely valuable contract, the one that changes a team, usually sits at small clubs, where a foreign signing is chosen with ten times the deliberation and there is no room for error. If that holds in football, it holds double in volleyball, where budgets are thinner and every personnel decision is a survival decision.

But I must audit myself here. When I say real value sits at small clubs, I am close to imposing a conclusion about Vietnamese women's volleyball drawn from international transfer markets. Every sport has its own context. Being Thai and working in Vietnam taught me that a conclusion drawn in Bangkok is not automatically true in Sóc Trăng, and a European model does not automatically translate to a domestic league with ten clubs, a short calendar and budgets funded mostly by local sponsors. The absence of something does not automatically mean injustice toward it. Sometimes it only means the structure does not yet exist.

I keep that question open, because I do not yet have enough data. And I think that is the first thing I owe a reader: I do not know. But I know what I need to count next.

There is one comparison I use so often it has become my signature on the desk: the comparison between two dispute systems — disputes on the court and disputes in the review room. In football, VAR does not reduce controversy. It moves it into another room and into a grey zone of the law. In volleyball, the video challenge works similarly, with one distinctive feature: challenges are limited, so each one is a genuine tactical decision, not just a reaction. That makes volleyball a sport where the rules do not merely officiate — they coach.

I have never seen Vietnamese journalism exploit this in women's volleyball. That is a concrete loss: ignore the challenge system and you ignore one of the reasons a good coach is good. You reduce tactics to a list of players.

I am not writing this to claim any team did anything wrong. I am writing it to name a specific gap that can be filled with work rather than emotion. An analysis of how a team uses challenges in the fifth set is a writable article. It just needs someone to watch enough matches to count.

And counting is something anyone can learn.

Let me return to 2026 once more, from a different side. Three out of twenty is a media failure. It is also a market fact: the other seventeen did not appear because someone hated women's volleyball. They appeared because a content stream was already plumbed, and that stream flows without being pushed. Women's volleyball is not in that stream. It sits in a side channel, and joining the two needs a canal, not a declaration.

Building the canal is hard. It needs people who understand volleyball well enough to explain a positional fault to someone who has never watched. It needs people willing to sit in the hall from warm-up. It needs people who can write about a lost set without adding a word to make it softer.

And it needs someone to accept an uncomfortable fact: this work will not be rewarded with instant fame. It will be rewarded with structure. A column. A podcast. A reading habit.

When every microphone points one way, I choose to stand in the gap. I still hold that sentence, but I have added a clause I could not have written at twenty: standing in the gap does not mean shouting loudly inside it. It means staying long enough that the gap becomes a place someone can sit.

Years after that final, I still do the same work: count, note, and choose one small detail to begin with. I no longer believe one article can change how a sport is seen. I do believe a hundred articles can change how a newsroom decides, and how a newsroom decides determines almost everything else.

That is why I do not write about matches as events. I write about them as evidence.

In volleyball, there is a detail I always look for on replay: the moment after the whistle and before the teams change ends. It lasts a few seconds. A libero wipes her hands on her shirt. A setter says something to the number-three blocker. A coach opens a notebook and closes it at once. No camera points there, and no line in any bulletin records it. But that is where the match is actually decided. And if you spend enough time looking into gaps like that, you begin to see Vietnamese women's volleyball not as a story of what was lost, but of what is being built, one training session at a time, by people who know nobody will film them.

I do not know whether in ten years three out of twenty becomes twelve out of twenty. I do not think that number is the right measure, though it is the only one I have.

What I know is this: every year, in some arena in Nha Trang, three thousand people will fill the seats, arrive before the first serve, and bring hand-painted banners. They do not need convincing that women's volleyball matters. They have known for a long time.

My job is to catch up with them.