Every Labour Day weekend, for more than eight decades now, something remarkable rolls into a North American city and quietly transforms its convention halls into a rolling festival of culture, community and a sport most of the world has never seen played. In September 2026, that something arrived in Montreal, where thousands of Chinese and Chinese-Canadian volleyball players, families and fans filled the Palais des Congrès at the edge of the city's Chinatown for the 81st North American Chinese Invitation Volleyball Tournament — known across two countries simply by its acronym, NACIVT.
The numbers alone tell part of the story. Tournament director Edmund Chan said more than 3,700 players took part across the men's and women's divisions over the three days, from September 5 to 7. Add the coaches, officials, spectators and the extended family networks that follow the sport from city to city, and Chan estimated the crowds could swell to between 5,000 and 7,000 people. "We have over 3,700 players in this tournament, both men's and women's combined," he said, "plus all the coaches involved, plus all the spectators involved, plus all the relatives involved." His words capture what the tournament has always been about: the people on the court are only the visible surface of a community that travels together, eats together and, for one weekend a year, remembers together.
The setting was fittingly symbolic. The Palais des Congrès sits steps from Montreal's own Chinatown, the kind of neighbourhood where this entire tradition was born generations ago. And the 81st edition arrived at a charged political moment. Canada and the United States were locked in a bitter trade dispute, yet here were thousands of Americans and Canadians sharing a court, a celebration and two national anthems. The tournament's opening ceremony on Saturday afternoon welcomed local dignitaries, community leaders and diplomats, including representatives of the American government. A dragon dance wound through the hall as the Canadian and American anthems were sung side by side — a quiet, athletic reminder of ties that run far deeper than any tariff file.
To understand why this tournament matters so much, you have to go back to where the game itself came from. Nine-man volleyball grew up in the parking lots and back alleys of North America's Chinatowns, born in the 1930s in an era when anti-Chinese sentiment and exclusionary laws pushed Chinese immigrants into tightly bounded communities. Restaurant workers and laundrymen, denied access to mainstream gyms and recreation spaces, socialized almost exclusively among themselves, and volleyball became their escape. The tournament's own history describes the game as a "gritty, athletic, chaotic urban treasure" traditionally played in parking lots and back alleys. The first organized tournament, the NACIVT, was established in 1944, according to the organization's materials, and has since grown into one of the longest-running cultural sporting events on the continent.
The game the men play bears little resemblance to the volleyball familiar on Olympic stages. In nine-man volleyball there are nine players to a side, a variation of the traditional six-player game that developed within Chinese American communities. The game is fast-paced and dynamic, according to the tournament's history, and is played in the men's division, while the women's division uses the traditional six-player format. The tournament's own literature celebrates the game as a "gritty, athletic, chaotic urban treasure."
One of the tournament's defining features remains its deeply meaningful eligibility rule. At least two-thirds of each team must be of 100 percent Chinese descent, with the remainder comprised of players of Asian descent, as defined by the tournament. It is a rule many participants describe, half-jokingly, as "racist," yet it was born of the very discrimination that forced Chinese immigrants to play in alleys in the first place. Over the decades it has become a way of preserving and defining the community's boundaries from within, even as the community includes an increasing number of mixed-race players.
For decades the tournament remained known mostly to its own community. Today it is held annually on Labour Day weekend in a different major metropolitan city, with Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Boston and Toronto among the cities that have hosted. The 80th edition was held in New York City in 2025.
The individual stories that surfaced in Montreal speak to how the tournament binds generations and cities. For Amanda Lacey, a player and coach who has played nine-man since she was about 14, heading to Montreal was a milestone: this was the first international tournament for the women's team she founded in Boston, the Boston Dragon Carps. "To be able to play is so special to me and I’ve gathered some of the most special women around me," she said. "We have nothing but good vibes and good energy and being able to compete with them is something that you really can’t compare." For Daniel Chiu of Toronto's Shen Long team, the weekend was a kind of homecoming: he started his NACIVT career in Montreal seven years ago and has now completed a full circuit of host cities, using the tournament each year as a way to reconnect with friends who scatter across the continent. "It’s just another way for us to come together and play together," he said.
Not everyone arrives with a championship in mind. Some teams are here to compete and win, while others are there for the experience and the community. "Some teams are here to compete and win," Chiu said. "But also other teams are here to have fun, support one another. So you get a bunch of everything."
For tournament director Edmund Chan, that sense of shared community is the entire point. The NACIVT, he said, is an opportunity to bring people together through sport while sharing Chinese and Asian culture with the host cities that welcome them. "We want as many people as we’d like to participate in our event," Chan said. "We want to share our culture, we want to share our community and we want to share the cities that are involved as well." On a Labour Day weekend when the relationship between the United States and Canada felt fractious at the governmental level, a few thousand players in a Montreal convention hall offered a different kind of diplomacy — one played nine to a side, in a game that began in an alley nearly a century ago and refuses to fade away.