For three and a half years, Adam and Milisha Marhefka lived four minutes from Brookside, and Adam always had his eye on the Club.
Adam already belonged to a golf club twenty-five minutes away, so when a trial opportunity came up at Brookside, he saw a low-risk way to try something closer to home.
"This is a reasonable price for a few months," he says. "Worst case, we use it a few times, you don't like it, and it's so what."
"When Adam first mentioned the trial, I didn't think I'd get much utility out of it," Milisha says. "I play a lot of racquet sports, tennis especially, and not really golf." Proximity to home and the range of activities on offer were enough to convince her to give it a shot.
"They treated us not like we were on a trial," Adam says. "They treated us like we were full Members right away, which was nice."
Adam remembers, "That's really where it started to spiral for Milisha, in the best way."
"I honestly don't know exactly when we went from being on a trial to becoming full Members," Milisha says. "The way people were interacting with us wasn't any different."
Milisha wasn't sure at first how much day-to-day use they'd get from a membership like this. It didn’t take long to find out.
"There's such a wide variety of activities to try," she says. "I think of it now as an investment in our health."
Dining was another area she didn't expect to use much, since she and Adam typically cook at home. That's changed, too.
"We'll play tennis in the morning, grab breakfast at the Club, spend some time by the pool, and be back playing sports again by evening," she says.
Where their schedule used to revolve around home projects it now runs on a vibrant rotation of golf and pickleball.
"We have a calendar by our door that Milisha fills in every week," Adam says, "and at this point, almost everything on it is Brookside."
They want to fill their time there. And that sense of community, Adam says, starts with how the Club treats its Members.
"The men and the women are equal members," he says. "It's not the guys and their spouses. That's nice, and different from a lot of other clubs."
Early on, staff asked Adam and Milisha what they'd like to see added to the Club's programming.
"I said we should try spikeball, and they said, 'That's an awesome idea, let's look into it,’” Adam noted. “They really want everyone to feel welcome."
That’s how it works here at Brookside.