A neighbor mentioned it in passing at the Beach Club pool last spring, almost as an aside: she'd finally gone out to the clays course after four years of Club membership and couldn't understand why she'd waited so long. She wasn't a hunter. She'd never fired a shotgun in her life. What stuck with her wasn't the shooting itself, it was the ride out. Fifteen minutes past Shark's Tooth Golf Course, down a road most members never turn onto, to a place that felt like it belonged to a different property altogether.
That place is the Watersound Club Sporting Preserve, and the reason so few residents have been has less to do with interest than with geography and design. The Club built this amenity to require effort, and that effort is precisely why it has stayed the quietest, least-discovered corner of a very well-known private club.
A different kind of distance
Everything else at Watersound Club rewards proximity. The Beach Club sits steps from the sand. Camp Creek and Shark's Tooth golf courses wrap around homesites. The Wellness Center, the pools, the tennis courts, all of it clusters within a short walk or a two-minute cart ride of wherever you're staying.
The Sporting Preserve breaks that pattern on purpose. It sits north of Shark's Tooth Golf Course, off Side Camp Road, reached only by checking in at the Shark's Tooth Golf Shop and then riding roughly 1.5 miles out on a Kawasaki MULE PRO-FX 1000 side-by-side. There's no walk-up option. No casual drive-by. You commit to the trip before you know whether you'll enjoy what's waiting at the end of it.
For a Club built around ease, that's a deliberate exception.
What's actually out there
Once the Mule ride ends, the setup is more serious than the phrase "clays course" suggests:
- A 15-station sporting clays layout, with clay throwers reprogrammed weekly so the angles, speeds, and directions change from one visit to the next
- Shotguns and ammunition available to rent, so first-timers don't need to own equipment
- A range officer or trapper who walks each station with you, releasing targets and managing safety
- Retail on site for anyone who wants to buy rather than rent
The Club's own description leans into the contrast between adrenaline and calm, framing each station as its own small test set against what it calls "breathtaking natural beauty." That tension, effort and stillness in the same fifteen minutes, is the whole appeal.
The person running it now
What makes the Preserve feel less like a bolt-on amenity and more like a real program is who's behind it. John Lemont took over as General Manager and Lead Instructor earlier this year, and his path there is not the usual golf-pro-to-club-job pipeline.
Lemont began his career as a commissioned officer in the United States Army, then joined the Rhode Island State Police, where he eventually retired as a member of the Command Staff. Somewhere in that stretch he also practiced law. After retirement, his path took a sharper turn toward the field: he became head guide and bird dog trainer at an exclusive hunting and fishing lodge in Patagonia, Argentina, working wild quail country and managing a string of bird dogs across difficult terrain. He later completed an Advanced Bird Dog Training Apprenticeship with the well-regarded Ronnie Smith Kennels in Pawhuska, Oklahoma.
That résumé matters here for a specific reason. A private club can hang a "sporting clays" sign on almost any patch of land. Staffing that patch with someone who has run dogs in Patagonia and trained under a nationally recognized kennel is a different level of commitment, and it tells you the Club sees the Preserve as more than a checkbox.
The point of a private clays course was never really the shooting. It's the two hours nobody can reach you.
Booking it, and who it's for
The Preserve isn't a walk-in experience, and it isn't open every day. Here's how access breaks down:
| Access point | How it works |
|---|---|
| Watersound Club members | Book through the Member App |
| Camp Creek Inn guests | Reserve through the hotel concierge, sessions run Wednesday through Sunday at 8 a.m. or 1 p.m. |
| Monday and Tuesday | Course closed |
There's a practical minimum age too. The Club generally starts shooters no younger than 14, with the reasoning being straightforward: enough upper body strength and maturity to handle a firearm safely and actually enjoy the session, rather than just endure it. Exceptions exist, but that's the baseline the staff works from.
Dress code is more relaxed than the age rule, but not absent. There's no formal requirement beyond one hard line: no open-toe shoes. Beyond that, the practical advice from the Club itself is about heat management more than fashion, since a session runs about two hours outdoors. Hat, sunglasses, sunscreen. Fifteen stations in August sun is a different experience than fifteen stations in November.
Pricing for the guided experience excludes trapper gratuity, which is worth knowing before you book rather than after.
Why the next few weeks are the moment
South Walton in August rewards shade and pool time, not two hours standing in open field exposure. That calculus starts to shift as the calendar turns toward fall. Cooler mornings make the difference between a session you tolerate and one you actually want to repeat, and repetition is the whole point of a course that reprograms its own targets weekly. Going once in July tells you almost nothing about the sport. Going three times between October and December, with the throwers set differently each visit, is how the "hunt the birds" framing the Club uses actually starts to make sense.
It also happens to be the season when the rest of the Club's calendar gets busier with member events, so a quiet Wednesday morning at the Preserve before the fall social schedule fills in is easier to find now than it will be in six weeks.
The bigger pattern
None of this happens in isolation. Watersound Club's August 2026 member magazine, Watersound Lifestyle, specifically calls out sporting pursuits alongside signature events like Rhythm on the Range as part of what the Club considers central to membership this year, not a side note buried behind golf and beach programming. Earlier in 2026, Camp Creek Inn, the boutique hotel that anchors this end of the property, earned a Four-Star rating from Forbes Travel Guide, a recognition that came less than three years after the property opened. Taken together, these aren't the signals of a club coasting on its beach access. They're signals of a property still actively investing in the parts of itself that take longer to notice.
The Sporting Preserve fits that pattern exactly. It sits far enough from the main amenities that convenience alone won't get you there. It's staffed by someone with a background serious enough to make the sport feel worth learning properly rather than sampling once for a photo. And it operates on a schedule tight enough that showing up requires a small amount of planning most people save for things they've already decided matter.
If you've lived in Watersound Beach long enough to have a favorite table at 30°86° and a standing tee time at Camp Creek, but you've never made the Mule ride out past Shark's Tooth, that's not an oversight. It's exactly what the Club built the Preserve to do. The only question left is whether this fall is when that changes.
If questions about life in Watersound Beach ever turn into questions about property here, the team at Geppert Beeker Group is a call away. Schedule a Personalized Consultation whenever the time feels right.
