Matt Wieder’s Saturdays at Brookside Country Club follow a rhythm he’s come to love. Not because someone planned it that way, but because it has just evolved into the perfect day. It starts a bit after sunrise, as he’s standing on the first tee.
“Usually it’s an early morning golf outing,” he says. “You go out, play 18 with your friends, get started around 7 a.m., done by maybe 10:30 or 11.”
Matt has been a Brookside Member for nearly 11 years. He and his wife, Christie, have three kids, Brody, 14, Brooke, 12, and Bryce, 9, who have grown up at the Club, which has provided the Wieder family with an escape from the hustle of the weekly grind and an extension of home.
Matt’s Saturday round of golf is only part of the story. What he values just as much is the ritual of arrival, or what can be described as the small, deliberate transition from the outside world into something slower and better. He pulls into the lot, carts are already waiting, his bag is set up. He laces up his golf shoes in the locker room, stops through the pub for a beverage, and makes his way out to the driving range to hit a few balls and catch up with whoever else is warming up.
“I put my phone on silent,” he says. “Actually, I’ve been leaving it in the car. I told my wife, ‘if you absolutely need me, call the cart barn. They’ll find me.’”
It’s not a small thing, he points out, to actually disconnect. The way Brookside is laid out, the transition from parking lot to first tee is gradual and intentional. By the time you’re standing on the opening hole, where you can look out and see Macungie Mountain in the distance, you’ve already mentally left everything else behind.
“It’s like a little vacation,” he says. “You can mentally go on vacation for an afternoon.”
As Matt makes his way up the 18th fairway, something happens that makes three-putting a real possibility.
“The pool is right there, adjacent to the 18th green,” he explains. “So if the kids are there early, I can call ahead. I tell them, ‘I’m coming up, I’m almost there.’ And they wait at the fence for you. They line up and cheer you on. That’s where you always three-putt easily, because everyone’s watching.”
He laughs about it, but you can tell he loves every second of it. After the round, he heads to the locker room to change, and the rest of the day begins.
The pool opens right around the time golf wraps up, which Matt is convinced is not a coincidence. Either Christie has already brought the kids over, or Matt swings home to grab them. Either way, they converge poolside, and the afternoon unfolds at exactly the right pace.
“All their friends are there,” he says. “The kids play in the diving well, there’s a volleyball net, the tennis courts are right there. Servers come around and bring food. It’s just… relaxing.”
Brookside’s pool, he notes, has one of the most expansive lounge areas in the region, with plenty of chairs, grassy areas, trees for shade. On swim meet days, he’ll admit he’s a little biased, but it’s the nicest facility around.
Brody, Brooke, and Bryce have all been on the Brookside swim team, and Matt credits it as one of the best decisions the family made at the Club. Neither he nor Christie were swimmers growing up, but they signed the kids up and never looked back.
“Instead of swim lessons, they just joined the team,” he says. “It taught them all their strokes, how meets work, how to compete. They’re strong swimmers now. It’s a life skill.”
There’s a social dimension to it that surprised him, too. Older kids on the team, some in high school, end up connecting with younger ones, and those bonds carry through the whole summer at the pool. His youngest, Bryce, spent last summer learning from the high school swimmers, all thanks to the structure of the program.
“That would have never happened otherwise,” Matt says.
Depending on how long the pool afternoon runs, poolside lunch has a way of turning into dinner. Or the family migrates inside to the pub, which was recently renovated at Brookside.
“If it’s really hot, it’s always nice to go to the pub after golf,” Matt says. “But the outside gazebo bar is fantastic.” In the fall, football Sundays at the gazebo are a whole separate occasion. With the game on outside screens, Members enjoy wings, beer, and a welcoming pub atmosphere. For the Wieder family, it’s become a fall tradition.
Christie, meanwhile, is often wrapping up tennis or pickleball. She played tennis in high school and college, and when Brookside started its pickleball program, she became one of its founding players and now captain for the third year running. The racquet facility operates year-round in an enclosed, heated space, which means there’s no real off-season for her.
“She said I need to do more tennis this year,” Matt admits. “But when I have free time, I want to play golf. So it’s a bit of a tug-of-war.”
In the afterglow of a weekend of golf and pool time, Brookside has a special activity on Monday afternoons you probably won't see at most private clubs.
About three years ago, the Club stocked the pond adjacent to the 18th green with bass and bluegill. The fish have thrived and multiplied. And on Mondays when the course is closed, Members are welcome to fish along the shoreline.
“As soon as Bryce gets out of school, we go,” Matt says. “I better have worms. I better have the rods in the trunk. He’s ready instantly.”
They fish for an hour or two, throw whatever they catch back in the pond, and head home for dinner. It’s a small thing, but it captures something larger about what Brookside means to this family. Matt describes it as the Club always finding ways to give you reasons to show up, even on a Monday.
Matt says his boys love catching fish, which are plentiful in the well-stocked pond. “I told Bryce, fishing isn’t this easy,” Matt laughs. “This is catch fishing. It’s not really fishing.”
As it turns out, Matt started at Brookside long before he was a Member. He was a busboy at age 15, then a waiter, a bartender, and eventually on the grounds crew. He knew the Club from the inside out. When he and Christie moved back to the area and started thinking about joining, he was apprehensive. He remembered a more formal, exclusive atmosphere from his working days.
What he found instead surprised him.
“The feel right away was so much different. Much more family-friendly. I remember walking away thinking, this is a totally different vibe than what I was expecting, in the best way.”
These days, he describes Brookside the way most people describe a good neighborhood: the servers know his kids’ names, someone’s always around to hand a child a Band-Aid, and it would be genuinely strange to show up and not run into someone you know.
He often uses a comparison that resonates with the way he thinks about money and finance professionally, working in real estate and mortgages.
“It’s as much as it would cost to have a lake house,” he says. “But you get all the memories, all the activities, and then you go home. You don’t have to worry about maintaining it, cleaning it, driving an hour to get there and finding no one else is around. Here, you see someone you know every single time.”
He and Christie have sponsored several Members over the years, and he says the sales pitch practically gives itself.
“Bring someone in for a day, and they see what we’ve been talking about in real life. It sells itself.”