World Tennis League

Over six weeks, our team visited 22 schools across Abu Dhabi and ran sessions for 2,415 students aged between 5 and 14. That’s a lot of school gates, a lot of kit bags, and a lot of early mornings, but it’s the kind of scale that makes this sort of campaign worth doing properly. Every session was designed to work for the age group in the room, whether that meant simplifying a drill for the younger years or adding a bit more challenge for the older ones. Students of determination were included in every school visit as a matter of course, not as an add-on or a special accommodation arranged separately. If a school had a PoD student in the class, they took part in the same session as everyone else, with the activity adapted where it needed to be.

The sessions themselves were built around movement rather than lecture. Rather than telling students about tennis, we put rackets and balls in their hands and ran them through fundamental skills using drills and mini challenges. The idea was to spark curiosity in a sport a lot of the students may never have tried, using games that felt more like play than practice. Coaches kept the pace high and the instructions simple, because with a six-week schedule and 22 different school environments, consistency mattered as much as creativity. Each visit had to feel fresh to the students receiving it while running to a format tight enough to repeat, correctly, over and over.

Alongside the on-court activity, every school visit came with branded giveaways, small touches that turned a PE lesson into something a student would talk about at home. The bigger prize on offer was the chance to win a Golden Ticket, giving selected students the opportunity to attend World Tennis League matches themselves. That link between the classroom session and an actual seat at the tournament was central to the whole campaign. It wasn’t enough to introduce tennis and leave it there. The goal was to turn a morning of drills into a reason to watch, and ideally into a reason to keep playing.

By the time the tournament itself got underway, the school outreach programme had done its job quietly in the background: thousands of students had already handled a racket, learned a few basics, and had a personal reason to care about who was playing. For a partner like World Tennis League, that’s a meaningful piece of audience building that happens well before the gates open. For HARAKA, it’s a clear example of what our events management and schools outreach teams can do together at genuine scale, across dozens of locations, in a tight timeframe, without losing the quality of the experience at any single school.

Where this fits in what HARAKA does

Campaigns like this sit at the point where two parts of our business meet: events management and school outreach. We run both as dedicated services, but the interesting work often happens when they’re combined, as it was with the World Tennis League project. Our events team knows how to plan and execute a brand activation with a sponsor’s goals and timeline in mind. Our schools team knows how to run a session that actually lands with a five year old or a fourteen year old, which are two very different audiences. Put those together and you get a campaign that a commercial partner can point to as real engagement, not just a logo on a banner.

We’ve done this kind of large-scale activation before. For six months, HARAKA ran the Sports, Fitness & Wellbeing Hub at EXPO 2020 Dubai, with a team of 32 delivering programming for visitors day after day across the site. That project and the World Tennis League school outreach look quite different on paper, one built around a fixed hub and the other spread across 22 different schools, but they draw on the same muscle: coordinating people, logistics and content so a major partner’s presence feels considered rather than bolted on. Building in inclusivity, including sessions for students of determination, isn’t something we treat as a bonus feature on projects like these. It’s part of how we plan from the start.

HARAKA is an Abu Dhabi based wellness company, and our flagship gym sits at the International Tennis Centre in Zayed Sports City, which makes tennis-related work like this one feel close to home. Beyond the gym floor, we work across six core services: Gym & Physical Wellness, Employee Wellbeing, Team Building, Events Management, School Outreach, and Active Youth Holiday Camps. That range means our clients aren’t limited to one type of engagement. A government entity might come to us for a wellbeing programme and later ask us to run a school activation for a sponsor they’re working with. A corporate partner might book us for team building one year and a public event the next. As an events company in Abu Dhabi with roots in coaching and wellness, we bring a slightly different eye to brand activations, one that thinks about participants first and branding second, which tends to produce results that a sponsor is actually proud of.

If you’re a brand, a school, or a sporting event looking at how to build genuine engagement with young people or the wider community in the UAE, we’d be glad to talk through what a campaign could look like. As a wellbeing company in Abu Dhabi that’s run everything from a six-month EXPO hub to six-week school tours, we’ve generally got a relevant story to share, and we’re always happy to hear about the next one.

Written by Rensché Graham Corporate Wellness Manager, HARAKA, October 2026

Reviewed by Sam Bolger, Managing Partner, HARAKA, October 2026