A Day at Son Gual

Most golf days are forgettable. You play, you leave, and you can't remember the score by Thursday. The days that stay with you are the ones where something changed - in your game, in what you understood about the course, or just in the conversation. This is what a day at Son Gual actually looks like.

Before You Arrive

A week before, I send a short questionnaire. What's frustrating you at the moment? Range game or course game? What would make this day a success for you? Most people write three sentences. That's all I need, but more info really helps me get a good picture and by the time we reach the first tee I already know what to watch for.

Tee times at Son Gual go early. That is not incidental - the course plays very differently in the first two hours of the day. The wind starts later. The fairways are quiet. The light across the Bay of Palma on the approach to the 8th hole at 8am is the kind of thing people send photos of. We aim for that window.

The Drive Up

Approaching Son Gual, the residential roads fall away and the landscape opens out - the kind of change that tells you you are going somewhere worth going. The course sits on elevated ground above the city. You feel it before you see it.

The First Tee

There is a pre-round briefing at the clubhouse. Coffee, a look at the scorecard, a short conversation about what we are working on. Not a technical lecture. Just enough to make the first tee feel intentional rather than rushed.

The first hole at Son Gual is a par 4. There are bunkers positioned exactly where a slightly off-centre drive goes. The wind on the first tee can be coming from a completely different direction to the wind on the 7th - Son Gual has its own ecosystem and the conditions change from hole to hole. That is the first thing I point out. It is also the thing that surprises everyone who has not played here before.

During the Round

The coaching is woven in, not delivered as commentary. There's a difference between a running analysis and the one observation at the right moment that actually changes something. I've coached enough rounds to know which one improves scores and which one just fills the air.

Most golfers lose the majority of their shots to the wrong decision, not the wrong swing. On a course like Son Gual - where the greens are fast and raised and where you miss matters more than how you swing - that becomes visible very quickly. We work on it in real conditions with a real score on the line. That is the only context in which it sticks.

The closing stretch from the 15th is something I look forward to on every round here. Four holes that make you hit proper shots. By the time we reach the 18th, most people are playing noticeably differently from how they were on the first tee. That is the point.

After the Round

The post-round debrief is over lunch on the terrace. The restaurant at Son Gual has views across the Bay of Palma that are worth the visit on their own. The food is good - local wine (everyone seems to be enjoying it, but as a tee-total, I couldn't tell you!), Mallorcan cooking, unhurried service. We talk through what improved, what to work on, and what the day actually revealed about the game. It's the conversation that makes everything that happened on the course make sense.

Most clients say they leave with one or two specific things that changed - a different club choice in a situation they had been getting wrong for years, a clearer sense of what their game is actually capable of, or just a better understanding of how to think around a difficult course. That is what I am trying to give them. The day at Son Gual is just the context in which it happens.