From Vung Tau to VakifBank: Gabi's Journey of Rediscovery and Lessons for Vietnamese Women's Volleyball

Late afternoon on August 12, 2026, I sat in the third row of Phu Tho Arena, watching a practice match between the Vietnam women's national volleyball team and an invited team from Kazakhstan. No spectators. No broadcast cameras. Just the sound of the ball bouncing on the wooden floor and coach Nguyen Tuan Kiet clapping steadily after every rally. While waiting for the second set to begin, I scrolled through my phone and came across a rare video from the FIVB organizers: Gabriela Braga Guimaraes — known to the volleyball world by the affectionate name Gabi — sitting by a pristine pool at the Brazil national training facility, talking with head coach Jose Roberto Guimaraes. The two were not discussing tactics. They were talking about the early days of leaving Brazil, the difficult decisions, and the fears that no match report has ever told. It was in that moment that I realized something: while Vietnamese fans are busy tracking every statistic from the national championship, the biggest story in world women's volleyball — the journey of departure and return of women who dare to leave their comfort zones — is almost absent from the news. That absence is not because it is unimportant. It is absent because we are accustomed to seeing only the final results. The backdrop of this story is built on a period of particular significance for women's volleyball. After the Rio 2026 Olympics, as Brazil's golden generation entered a transition phase, a new class of athletes was forced to make decisions that would shape their entire careers. Among them, Gabi carried the highest expectations. She was twenty years old, having just secured a place on the senior national team, bringing the attacking instincts of a player who had played multiple sports before coming to volleyball. But big dreams come with big fears. Gabi recalled that she had a plan to play overseas, but could not be sure whether she was ready. Accumulated injuries made her question whether she had what it took to play in the strongest league on the planet. And after the Rio 2026 Olympics, while still gradually earning her place on the national team, she understood that she needed to be mentally ready — not only as an athlete, but as a person. Perhaps by that point, she needed to leave her comfort zone and make sacrifices to take the next step in her career. Brazilian women's volleyball is not short of examples of those who left and returned in glory. But most of those stories tend to be told in a sequence: excellence domestically, recruitment by a big club, brilliance on the international stage. The hardest part, the part the news rarely touches, is the period before the first contract is announced: sleepless nights in hotel rooms, solitary training sessions because no one speaks her language, and the loneliness of a twenty-year-old athlete standing in Istanbul — a city of sixteen million — with no family by her side. For Gabi, this period began when she decided to sign with VakifBank ahead of the 2026-2026 season. This was not only her first step overseas, but a direct step to one of the strongest teams on the planet, to a club considered the standard-bearer of European women's volleyball. According to cross-verification from the VuaBong.vn database, over three seasons at VakifBank, Gabi scored a cumulative total of over one trillion points? No, the exact number should be understood differently. Let the data speak for itself. In the 2026-2026 season, Gabi was part of the VakifBank lineup that won 3-0 against Eczacibasi VitrA in the Turkish national championship final. The following season, she was voted most valuable player of the European club championship. Those are searchable numbers. But the number I want to emphasize is not in the statistics table: the hours Gabi spent training additionally with coach Giovanni Guidetti after official practice, when the whole team had returned to the hotel. According to the story she told, it was Guidetti who told her he wanted to prepare her to become team captain. Gabi was shocked. She said she had never seen herself in that position. This is the core point I want to analyze: when a talented female athlete decides to go overseas, she does not only face professional pressure. The greater pressure is the reshaping of self-identity. Gabi before Rio 2026 was a young girl who had played multiple sports, had dreamed of being an athlete since childhood, and had stood in Brazil's youth national team in 2026 in Saquarema, alongside the golden generation that had just won gold at the Beijing Olympics. The first time she was called up to Brazil's youth national team was in 2026. She was fourteen years old, standing beside athletes she had only seen on television. She recalled that it was a strong signal that she should continue: she had never been so close to her dream. That dream was to wear the Brazil national team jersey, win a medal, and hear the national anthem play as she stood on the podium. But the national dream and personal life in Europe are two different worlds. At VakifBank, Gabi encountered a volleyball culture that demanded absolute professionalism. She said the scenario she found when she arrived changed her way of thinking. It showed her right from the start that she was entering a whole other level of volleyball. The early period was challenging and demanding. There was no room for hesitation. In some places, talent is enough to win. At VakifBank, talent is only a necessary condition. The sufficient condition is the ability to endure loneliness, focus in front of thousands of unfamiliar spectators, and daily discipline that no one sees. So why does Gabi's story matter for Vietnamese women's volleyball at this moment? Because we are in the middle of a similar cycle. Over the past three years or so, the number of Vietnamese female players going overseas to compete has increased significantly. Some contracts are widely announced, some agreements are only mentioned in brief press conferences. But a larger question has not been properly raised: how are we preparing our female players mentally, not just physically and technically, before they depart? When I watched the Vietnam women's team practice matches in Phu Tho, I noticed something interesting: the technical ability of young players is increasingly approaching Asian standards. But when asked about going overseas, most of them give a familiar answer: I am not ready yet. That answer is similar to Gabi's answer before 2026. And that means we have a missed opportunity: the opportunity to turn hesitation into part of the training process. The counterintuitive point lies here. In many discussions about Vietnamese women's volleyball, the dominant idea is: to develop, players must have more opportunities to go overseas. This is not wrong. But it overlooks an important variable: the women's transfer market itself does not operate by the same logic as the men's. In women's volleyball, big clubs recruiting young players often do so for marketing potential and long-term technical refinement, not because they need to fill a position immediately. This means young female players going overseas often have to accept more bench time, more training, and more patience than their male counterparts of the same age. If we only guide players to believe that going overseas is a straight path to stardom, we are placing them before a mental shock that current training centers are not prepared to handle. That is why I return to the detail of Guidetti wanting to make Gabi captain. This was a decision about building a person, not building tactics. Guidetti saw in Gabi not just a main attacker, but someone capable of leading a collective. And Gabi, who had never imagined herself in that position, learned to see herself through someone else's eyes. That is the kind of change no training center can program. It requires an environment with a coach trusting enough to delegate, and a player brave enough to reject fear in an instant. In Vietnamese women's volleyball, we are lacking both factors at a systemic level, not lacking talent. Looking back at Gabi's journey from Saquarema to Istanbul, I think of the girls I met at Phu Tho Arena. One of them, an eighteen-year-old outside hitter, once told me she was afraid of going overseas because she feared no one would cook for her. That is a real fear, and it taught me more than any tactical analysis session. Because when Gabi says she needed to be mentally ready as a person before being an athlete, she is saying exactly what that eighteen-year-old girl is afraid of. We often praise women who dare to overcome fear. We rarely ask who prepared them to overcome it. And that is precisely the gap I see: between the declaration of pioneering spirit and the infrastructure of mental support, the distance is still too great. Moscow is not only where I mispronounced a player's name, but where I learned to listen to a person. Gabi's story, in a way, operates the same way. It begins with a conversation by the pool, not with a match. It passes through injuries, doubts, late-night calls home, before ending with a medal. When we look at statistics tables, we see points. When we look at the story, we see the value of daring to step forward while unsure whether we can. People call them imported players, I call them pathbreakers. Every overseas contract of a Vietnamese female player is a cultural adventure, not just a career choice. And if we want those adventures to succeed, we need to build the mental logistics before building the international head-to-head record. The court is empty, but the applause remains — it just comes from people who are not written about. Could it be that the biggest question for Vietnamese women's volleyball in the upcoming major tournament cycle is not how many players we need to send overseas, but how we will accompany them in those first months away from home?