Every October the tennis community of New South Wales puts on a dinner jacket and celebrates. The 2026 Tennis NSW Awards ran at Le Montage on Thursday 15 October, twenty one categories, two Hall of Fame inductions, and Casey Dellacqua and John Fitzgerald on the microphone.

We were not there from the start. Tennis NSW lost their event coordinator in August and we came in to take over delivery with about seven weeks on the clock. The guest list, the seating, the signage, the show content and the script all moved across to us, and the night went ahead exactly as it was always meant to.

Client: Tennis NSW
Year: 2026
Venue: Le Montage, Lilyfield, Sydney
Format: Three course awards dinner
Audience: Players, coaches, officials, volunteers, clubs and associations from across New South Wales

What we delivered

• Took over event delivery in late August, roughly seven weeks from the night, after the client’s event coordinator departed
• Guest list and RSVP management across invited guests and ticket purchases, including dietary and accessibility requirements, seating and name badges
• The full MC script for Casey Dellacqua and John Fitzgerald, covering twenty one categories, finalist citations and the questions put to every winner on stage
• Awards presentation build and show AV, including lectern artwork and running the client’s winner and Hall of Fame videos in show
• Room styling and signage, with print production of the media wall to Tennis NSW’s design
• Staging of the two Hall of Fame presentations, from plaque handover positions to the live Q and A setup

Two careers, inducted on the one night

Di Balestrat and Bill Bowrey went into the Tennis NSW Hall of Fame within two hours of each other. Di reached world number four from Albury and held a winning record against Billie Jean King. Bill won the 1968 Australian Championships, the last amateur to take the men’s singles title before the Open era began. Tennis NSW supplied the induction films and we built them into the show, then staged what followed: where the plaque is handed over, where the presenter goes once it is, and how two chairs and a live conversation hold a room that is halfway through dinner. The Q and A with Di ran close to fifteen minutes. Nothing about that segment was allowed to feel rushed.

Twenty one awards and three courses

Twenty one categories is a lot of trophies. Each one needs its finalists read, a sponsor brought to the microphone, a winner walked to the stage, a citation, a pause for photographs and a question or two, and all of it has to thread between entrée, main and dessert without the room ever feeling like it is waiting. That is a scheduling problem before it is anything else, and it gets solved on paper. The script runs to the minute from 6:45pm, with the service breaks built in, so the kitchen and the stage were working off the same clock all night.

The questions were written weeks earlier

The warmest moments in an awards night are usually the unscripted ones, which is funny, because somebody has to script them. Every question Casey and John had in front of them came out of a nomination form read at a desk weeks before: asking an official how he came to build twenty-two scoreboards, asking a coach what on earth Volley and Vino is. Get that right and a winner gets thirty seconds to sound like themselves instead of thirty seconds of applause and a walk back to their table.