Before the Titles: Alcaraz's Family Tennis Club in El Palmar

First, the clay

Town & Country, in a January 2026 profile of the family, added a detail that reads like foreshadowing. The grandfather chose red clay rather than hard courts. Hard courts would have been cheaper. Clay was what Spain played on. Nobody building a village club about forty years ago could have known that a grandson would later win the French Open twice on the same surface, but it is hard not to smile at the choice.

The club is the Real Sociedad Club de Campo de Murcia. One small puzzle we could not settle: its short Wikipedia entry gives a founding year of 1923, which does not fit neatly with a tennis club built about forty years before 2023. The likeliest explanation is that the society is older than the tennis facility, but I have not found a primary source that says so, and I would rather flag the gap than paper over it.

Then, a father who ran the place

His father, Carlos Alcaraz Gonzalez, played tennis seriously as a teenager and gave up the professional path because the money was not there, according to the ATP account and his Wikipedia biography. He later became the club's director and coached there. His son was born on May 5, 2003, and started playing at the club at the age of four.

• The boy's social life, the ATP account says, revolved around the club.
• His father recalled that he cried when he had to stop playing to go home for dinner.
• By 12 he had racket and clothing sponsors, and a family friend who owns the dessert company Postres Reina covered travel costs.
• His mother, Virginia Garfia, worked in retail while raising four boys, all of whom play.

That list is the answer to the question behind the search. Alcaraz did not arrive at tennis through an academy brochure. He grew up in the family business, and the family business happened to be a clay court.

After El Palmar, Villena

At 15 he began working with Juan Carlos Ferrero, the former world No. 1, at Ferrero's academy in Villena, a little over an hour from El Palmar by the ATP's description. The partnership lasted more than seven years and produced six majors before the two announced their split on December 17, 2025.

The academy thread did not break with that announcement. Samuel Lopez, now his head coach, helped set up that same Villena academy when he was 20, according to Clay Tenis. So the coach in the box today is a man who was there at the founding of the place Alcaraz went next. Tennis families, it turns out, are not always related by blood.

Once more, home

The circle closed in 2026 in a way nobody would have chosen. When tenosynovitis in his right wrist kept him off the tour from April 14 until August 31, El Espanol reported that he tested the recovering wrist with long training sessions at home in Murcia. The club now also hosts an academy carrying his name, which Wikipedia describes as still growing. We could not independently confirm his current weekly routine there, but the ATP noted in 2023 that he still went back to El Palmar on weekends.

His older brother Alvaro now travels as a hitting partner, and the youngest, Jaime, has been playing junior events. Somewhere under all that red clay is a shooting range. I find it oddly fitting that a family built its future on a place where people used to aim at small moving targets.