When businesses compare corporate team-building within the office with one that happens in the form of tennis, they would be in for a surprise. This is because tennis is more effective in building rapport compared to spending a day in a conference room and forcing interactions.
Tennis is a fun sport and an activity which is easy to play if not extremely difficult to master. Social doubles in a work situation, allows for quick fire matches and no one is allowed to feel left out as there is always mixing. Win or lose there are always laughs on court and guaranteed to get people talking. Want to have fun, bring people together and have a great time, then corporate tennis just might be it.
Thanks to tennis’ broader momentum where adult participation in Britain grew 44% between 2019 and 2023, reaching around 5.6 million people, the sport has been pulled out of the club membership bracket and brought into recreational settings. This includes corporate events. Companies are booking sessions because the players exist and the format works in terms of building genuine interactions.
Why Tennis Creates Conversations That Scheduled Networking Cannot
There is no disengaging from a rally. It encourages genuine interaction without the need to point out that networking is taking place. With rotation-based doubles, the finance director can be placed next to a junior hire from a different department within the first twenty minutes. At this point, the court will handle the introduction and rapport.
For hybrid teams who book meeting rooms in Dublin in between remote stints, tennis is a good sport that gives distributed colleagues a common physical reference point that a video call can never give. Businesses will be surprised how the next remote meeting runs better after a tennis session.
What Actually Happens in a Well-Run Corporate Session
For a half-day session, it usually starts with a coached warm-up. Then, it moves into rotating doubles across three or four courts. Finally, it closes with food and informal debrief. With round-robin formats, everyone is kept active and removes the weight of a single result. In this case, nobody watches from the sideline.
Forty minutes of doubles actually does more for cross-team familiarity compared to what most facilitated workshops achieve in a full day. Plus, nobody has to take notes during a doubles game.
Mixed Ability Works, But Only If the Format Is Designed for It
The skill range in the room rarely causes the problem, but a badly designed format will expose it within the first rotation. Coaches who run corporate sessions know this; they pair beginners strategically, shorten the effective court area, and use no-ad scoring to keep rallies and games moving. The fix is straightforward, but it requires a coach who has run corporate sessions before rather than one borrowed from a club’s junior programme.
The Venue Decision Sets the Ceiling Before Anyone Arrives
Attendees read the venue before they pick up a racket. An indoor facility with maintained courts, changing rooms, and a catering setup within easy reach of the city centre signals that the event was planned with care. A municipal court with no shelter and a twenty-minute drive from the office signals something else, and the energy in the room reflects that regardless of what happens on court.
In Dublin, where most corporate tennis events draw from a workforce concentrated in the city centre and the south docklands, proximity is not a convenience, it is an attendance variable. Mid-week events requiring significant travel time see lower turnout and shorter post-event engagement. The venue choice is a forecast of participation, not just a logistics decision.
There are many private tennis clubs throughout Dublin and not just in the city. Carrickmines, Castleknock and David Lloyd Riverview to name but a few. All provide excellent facilities for corporate tennis events and some even have additional facilities like sauna, steam and spa. There is huge scope for creating corporate experiences with tennis at the centre in such clubs.
Recurring Events Build What a Single Day Cannot
One session shifts the mood for a day, but the people who played together last quarter ask each other questions directly rather than copying three managers on an email. That shift does not come from a single booking; it comes from the familiarity that builds across a second session, then a third.
Companies running quarterly tennis events between departments, or internal leagues across office locations, report that the social return compounds in ways a single away-day never reaches. The post-event survey will not capture it. It shows up three weeks later, when two people who had never properly spoken are solving a problem together without needing a meeting to do it.