Brad Wheatley, Director of Golf Operations
Brad Wheatley, a.k.a. ‘Senor Cabo Golf,’ has been in Los Cabos since the beginning of the golf boom.
A native of Texas, Wheatley attended the University of Arizona in Tucson, where he played on the college team. He left school to try to qualify for the PGA Tour, later foregoing competitive golf to get into the golf business.
His first job was as an assistant pro at La Jolla Country Club north of San Diego, Calif. One of the club’s members was Don Abelardo Rodriguez, son of a former president of Mexico and a Cabo tourism pioneer who built the legendary Hotel Palmilla in 1956. The 29-year-old Wheatley was hired as Palmilla’s director of golf in 1991 and opened the club’s Jack Nicklaus Signature course (his first in Latin America) a year later.
Wheatley later moved to a sister development, Cabo del Sol, where Nicklaus laid out a course along a mile-long stretch of shoreline on the Sea of Cortes. When it opened in 1994, the Ocean Course, the first Mexican venue to achieve ‘Top 100 in the World’ status, put Los Cabos on the international golf map.
Following his stint at Cabo del Sol, Brad consulted at Chileno Bay during the early stages of its development. He also worked as a representative for Jack Nicklaus from 2006 – 15, consulting on several design projects in Los Cabos and mainland Mexico. Wheatley also served as director of golf at Quivira Golf Club, opening the course in 2014.
Retained by Rancho San Lucas as director of golf operations in 2017, Wheatley has been instrumental in guiding Solmar Group’s first golf development to fruition.
“Like course designer Greg Norman has said, Rancho San Lucas is very diverse and has the best attributes of everything Cabo has to offer,” Wheatley explains. “There’s rich desert vegetation and winding arroyos and beautiful dunes. It has holes on the beachfront and in the rolling foothills. All 18 holes have ocean views. And the naturalness of Greg’s ‘least-disturbance’ course design is special. Rancho San Lucas clearly has the markings of Cabo’s next great golf course.”
