Taylor Decker’s perfect summer beach day with her three-year-old daughter and two-year-old twins starts when she pulls into the parking lot at Surfrider Beach Club. She has surprisingly few items to get out of the car. Her parents’ beach cabana and her own family’s locker have what she needs for the day: swim diapers, buckets, sunscreen, towels, blankets and beach chairs, stashed there since Memorial Day.
Wheeling the kids down the hallway Decker has known since she was their age, she passes rows of lockers, small changing rooms, cabanas of varying sizes, and a 25‑yard swimming pool. She sets up her space on an immaculately groomed patch of sand near palm trees—the same spot her parents favored when she was a child.
She starts with bagels and coffee. Her twins nap while her three‑year‑old gets alone time in the pool. Next is playground time and lunch. At dinnertime, her parents and grandmother arrive—four generations around a picnic table. At day’s end, Decker gives the kids a shower at the beach, pulls pajamas over sun‑tired bodies, and heads home, where they go straight to bed.
“There’s just something so wholesome about seeing your kids walk around the beach in their pajamas, talking to and engaging with people that you consider family,” she says.
Decker’s view of the perfect family summer is something that’s shared by thousands of people from Monmouth County and up and down the Jersey Shore. It’s why news anchor Brian Williams fondly recalls biking to Surfrider, singer Charlie Puth talks about once hustling to make money at Driftwood Beach Club, and New Jersey’s most famous rocker has had a club membership for years.
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Today, there are about 15 private seasonal beach clubs from Cape May to Long Beach Island, Spring Lake to Sea Bright. Many localities also run their own municipal or community beaches with seasonal badges. The dividing line is simple: Seasonal club memberships include storage facilities, changing rooms, snack bars and pools, while municipal beaches have limited parking and amenities.
Nowhere are the private beach clubs more visible than in Sea Bright, where seven oceanfront clubs are clustered among borough‑run beaches wedged in between Ocean Avenue and the water.
Surfrider Beach Club’s owner and managing partner, Nicole LoBiondo, runs the club with her brothers, continuing a family operation that dates back to the mid‑1980s. The club started as a simple structure, expanded over the years, and then was rebuilt after Superstorm Sandy, which damaged all the Sea Bright beach clubs. Now, the 650 families who are members enjoy a club that includes a lap pool, playgrounds, an area for grilling, a Tiki bar for adults, a snack bar and an event space that is used for weddings.
For many families, the appeal is less about pools and playgrounds than about the guaranteed parking, storage and familiar faces.
A seasonal membership with a locker starts at $6,000 for a family of four. A beach cabana, which is typically shared by multiple families, begins at $26,000 and includes a private changing space, shower, electricity and loft storage. Some clubs in Sea Bright charge as much as $40,000 for a family membership that includes a beach cabana.
But don’t rush down to the club to sign up this summer. Like many of the private clubs, Surfrider’s waiting list has 180-200 families on it.
Getting in, however, isn’t always straightforward. When Tom Aronne, who spent a decade as a member at Surfrider, started looking for a club years ago, he made the rounds.
“At Chapel Beach Club, they literally laughed at me and said, ‘The only way you’re getting in is if you have a family member who has been here for decades and then passes away, leaving it to you,’ ” he says. To Aronne, the process felt opaque and personal. “Whether you call it politics or favoritism, these clubs are looking for people who fit their mold.”
Aronne says his Surfrider years defined his kids’ summers—and also revealed how club membership functions socially. “When you live in this area and meet another couple, the beach‑club question is one of the top three you get: Where do you live, where do your kids go to school, and what club are you at? When you say which club you’re in, it gives a little bio about you—almost like a social résumé.”
Robert Manse, a member at the nearby Sands Beach Club, recalls how quickly he committed when his name finally came up on the waiting list. “I literally drove the check over on a winter day and dropped it in their mailbox because I was so excited,” he says. “Every year, I joke that when we get the email for the first check, I write back, ‘This is my favorite bill I get all year round,’ just to make sure we’re locked in.”
Private beach clubs like Surfrider and Sands represent a deep local history of private clubs at the Jersey Shore. Greg Kelly, a local historian, says Sea Bright’s first true private club, Sea Bright Beach Club, dates to about 1895 and was founded not by locals, but by wealthy Rumson families who lived nearby on estates.
“Even at the turn of the 20th century,” he notes, “some wealthy visitors wanted exclusivity—their own place, separate from the general public.”
Kelly says of the current beach clubs, “They’re very well run, often family run, and the operators treat people right.” Those elements matter, he says, because joining “doesn’t make sense on paper.” He adds, “Maybe the air is a little sweeter in Sea Bright.”
Patricia Spahr, who spent 38 years as Sea Bright’s tax and sewer collector, knows each of the seven Sea Bright clubs intimately because, initially, she had to physically read all the clubs’ deduct water meters—devices that track water used for pools and irrigation that doesn’t go into the sewer. At first, she says, the clubs were collections of new and old buildings.
After Superstorm Sandy, which destroyed all the clubs, she says, “each rebuilt differently, but they all look great.”
For years, however, they were also at the center of a fight over how much of their sand the public could actually use. In the 1990s and 2000s, the state allowed several clubs to limit the public to a narrow ribbon of sand at the water’s edge, even after taxpayer‑funded replenishment widened their beaches.
“They used to have off‑duty cops on quads at each end of the club’s beach,” recalls surf instructor Thomas Anderson. “They’d watch everyone walking through, and if someone stepped more than a few feet up or tried to put down a blanket, they’d swoop in like you were setting up on the White House lawn.”
After legal challenges and a state Supreme Court ruling, the clubs and the borough ultimately agreed to open up much more of their frontage to general beachgoers, allowing the public to swim, fish and otherwise use part of the beach in front of the clubs.
Up and down the coast, many elite clubs keep a low profile. Cape May Beach Club, for example, notes on its website that it is a long‑established, members‑owned club that only accepts new members through referrals. Spring Lake Bath and Tennis Club lays out a detailed dress code on its site, with rules about the dining room and requirements for mostly white tennis clothing.
Aronne says that even inside this little world, boundaries matter. He recalls attending a swim meet among clubs. “I went up to the bar at Sea Bright Beach Club and ordered a vodka on the rocks. They asked if I was from Sea Bright Beach Club. When I said I was there with Surfrider, they refused to serve me. It felt almost like crime families—like you’re a Bonanno, not a Lucchese, and you can’t drink here.”
Sea Bright’s mayor, Brian Kelly, sees the clubs as both economic anchors and part of the town’s identity. “They’re a huge part of who we are,” he says. After Sandy, “the beach clubs were among the first entities to rebuild, and many were open by that summer, which helped kickstart the town functioning again.” He describes them as successful businesses that help fuel a robust restaurant and shopping scene in a small community of about 1,700 residents.
When asked to describe to a person outside of Jersey what’s it like to join a private beach club, Surfrider member Decker says, “It’s the difference between going to the beach and living at the beach.”
R.C. Staab is a travel writer, book author, playwright, and wildlife and Jersey Shore enthusiast.
