The World Tennis League is a relatively new exhibition tennis format — teams rather than individuals, top-ten ATP and WTA players, multi-day round-robin into finals — staged in indoor arena venues rather than the traditional tennis stadium environment. The 2022 inaugural edition and the 2023 second edition were held at Coca-Cola Arena Dubai, with IP Care delivering the IT operation for both.
This case study walks through how indoor-arena-tennis IT differs from outdoor tennis tournament work and from non-tennis arena events, the Hawk-Eye integration story, and what carried across from year one to year two.
— What is technically different about indoor arena tennis —
Three things shape indoor-arena tennis IT relative to other event categories. The first is the temporary court installation. Coca-Cola Arena is not natively a tennis venue. The court is installed for the duration of the event over the standard arena floor, which means the on-court connectivity, the Hawk-Eye camera positions, the chair umpire connectivity and the team-area integration all have to be installed and removed per edition. The cabling routing, the equipment placement and the on-court networking all sit on top of a non-permanent surface.
The second is the Hawk-Eye integration. Hawk-Eye is the officiating technology for ball-tracking, line-calling and broadcast graphics, deployed at every elite tennis event. It is a multi-camera optical system with its own dedicated processing rig and integration into both the chair umpire workflow and the broadcast graphics. The venue IT operation has to provide the network plant, the camera positioning support and the integration with broadcast and chair-umpire workflows.
The third is the team-exhibition format. Unlike a traditional tour event with one match on at a time, World Tennis League rounds run as team matches with multiple constituent matches stacked across an evening session. The broadcast and on-court workflows have to handle the team format, with team-area connectivity, coaching integration, results aggregation across the team scoreline and broadcast graphics that operate at the team level rather than the individual match level.
— Architecture (both editions) —
The Coca-Cola Arena build was anchored on the existing arena network footprint with tennis-specific additions: high-density WiFi 6 coverage across the bowl, concourses, hospitality and back-of-house; a Cisco Catalyst 9500-class broadcast LAN physically segmented from every other network; a dedicated Hawk-Eye integration network connecting the camera array, the processing rig and the chair umpire and broadcast positions; on-court connectivity for the chair umpire, line judges and the team-area integration; press centre LAN with broadcast-grade uplinks; team-area connectivity for the participating teams; and the standard arena CCTV layer integrated with venue command.
— The kit —
Approximately 90 HPE Aruba WiFi 6 access points across the venue. A redundant Aruba CX 8325 switching core. An active-passive Palo Alto firewall pair. A Cisco Catalyst 9500-class broadcast LAN. A dedicated Hawk-Eye integration network. On-court cabling and connectivity for chair umpire, line judges and team areas. Press centre LAN. Team-area connectivity for each participating team. The NOC ran continuous for the multi-day round-robin and finals window.
— The numbers —
Two consecutive editions, 2022 and 2023. Approximately 15,000 spectators per session. Multiple team matches per evening across a six-day window. Zero broadcast-impacting incidents across both editions. Zero Hawk-Eye-impacting incidents during live matches. The chair umpire and on-court officiating workflows operated cleanly across every match of both editions.
— Operational rhythm —
World Tennis League runs evening sessions across the six-day window. The IT operation maintains a steady state across the run, with pre-session validation each afternoon and continuous monitoring during the evening match windows. Pre-edition validation cycle was three days. T-3: full integration test across all networks plus a Hawk-Eye walkthrough with the broadcast and officiating teams. T-2: dress rehearsal of the chair umpire and team-area workflows. T-1: hard validation freeze and final broadcast handshake. Match day cadence: pre-session bridge meeting at 14:00, hard freeze at 16:00 for an 18:00 doors call, continuous monitoring through the evening sessions.
— Year-on-year evolution —
The 2022 edition was the inaugural delivery and required first-principles build of the Hawk-Eye integration network, the team-area connectivity workflow and the on-court cabling design. By 2023, those elements were documented and largely template-driven, which materially shortened the build window. The 2023 broadcast LAN was upgraded for slightly higher production resolution. The team-area integration was refined based on year-one feedback from the participating teams.
The pattern is consistent with the FIFA-UFC-NBA continuity story: year one is design-heavy, year two onwards is validation-heavy against an existing template.
— The hardest moments —
Year one's hardest moment was the Hawk-Eye integration handshake during the T-2 dress rehearsal. The camera array positioning had been completed against the design specification, but the actual sight-lines from the camera positions to the court required minor refinement on site — the predictive model had been accurate to within centimetres, but tennis ball-tracking demands tighter precision than that. The on-site adjustment took most of a working day and was completed before the first match. The lesson — Hawk-Eye camera positioning is a final-day on-court calibration task, not a build-design task — went into the year-two template and the 2023 build avoided the same lesson.
Year two's hardest moment was a brief team-area network finding during a busy session — a single team’s coaching-area connectivity dropped briefly between matches. Caught immediately, traced to a switchport configuration that had been edited during the build, remediated within minutes, the team match itself was unaffected. The configuration version-control discipline that has been a recurring theme across every event we deliver caught this one before it surfaced live.
— What works —
Continuity across editions. Same team running the second edition. Same operating model. The Hawk-Eye integration template, the team-area connectivity workflow and the on-court cabling design from year one all flowed into year two and shortened the build window substantially.
On-court cabling discipline. The temporary court installation means the on-court cabling and equipment placement is installed and removed per edition. Doing it cleanly the first time, with documented routing and labelled terminations, makes the second-edition removal and re-installation substantially easier.
Hawk-Eye integration as a continuous engagement with the broadcast and officiating teams. The integration is not a one-shot pre-event sign-off — it is a continuous engagement through the event window, with the broadcast graphics team and the chair umpire workflow observing the integration in real time. Treating it as continuous, not transactional, is what produces clean officiating across the multi-day window.
— What we would change —
Stage a full additional Hawk-Eye camera position pre-built for the worst-case on-court calibration deviation. The year-one finding consumed a day of remediation; pre-staged spare camera positioning equipment turns that into a 30-minute swap.
Move the team-area connectivity to a slightly higher baseline. Year-one team-area requirements were modest; year-two requirements were higher; the next edition is likely to be higher again as participating teams bring more sophisticated coaching technology. Pre-engineering for the upper end of the range is cheaper than retrofitting per edition.
— Why this matters —
Indoor arena tennis is a growing event category — exhibition formats, team formats and city-circuit events are appearing more frequently in venues that are not natively tennis venues. The capability to deliver tennis-grade IT in an arena environment is a specific blend of arena-event experience, on-court cabling discipline, Hawk-Eye integration history and team-format workflow understanding. The 2022 and 2023 World Tennis League editions developed this capability and informed our subsequent work on the Mubadala Abu Dhabi Open and other tennis engagements in the region.