What is Pickleball Guesthouses?
The idea behind Pickleball Guesthouses is to facilitate pickleball travel while fostering community. It is about sharing our experiences, passions, and homes as we enlarge our pickleball communities.
Pickleball Guesthouses is aimed at facilitating interaction among people from various communities by making it easier to connect with other pickleball groups while diminishing travel costs.
Pickleball Guesthouses provides access to free accommodations across the country (and around the world) for a small registration fee (just $20 per trip). And even this nominal fee is waived for every night YOU host someone in your home.
Pickleball Guesthouses for the Greater Good: The website also provides opportunities to share and support causes, pickleball-related and beyond, that members of the community support, such as Women Beyond Cancer, which is offering restorative pickleball retreats.
Who is behind this site?
Penny Eifrig is a long-time entrepreneur, with a children's book publishing company (www.EifrigPublishing.com), a translation company, and an environmental clothing company (www.knuetes.com) on her vitae. She considers herself a community activist with a focus on kids, and started a refugee awareness campaign after volunteering at a refugee camp in Berlin, Germany (www.theyhavenamesberlin.org) and a literacy non-profit (randomactsofreading.org). She is also a life-long athlete. She was introduced to pickleball in 2015 by her teenage daughter and senior mother. She was immediately hooked.
2018 started out with a breast cancer diagnosis, the day after she signed up to play in her first US Open Pickleball Championships. That initiated much contemplation about what was important in her life. Pickleball, remarkably, was near the top, next to family and community.
Waking up with an idea to combine her passions
She discovered that she was not the only one who cherished the friendships made on and off the court. Pickleball seemed to bring together just the right amount of competition and camaraderie. And with everyone’s busy lifestyles, she found the people she saw most often were the ones with whom she played pickleball.
Penny soon found that the kindness she had experienced within her own group was reflected in every interaction she had with other groups, whether in person or online. Following an invitation to join the inaugural pickleball retreat organized by Women Beyond Cancer, she decided to find a way to connect people in the pickleball community. In a burst of inspiration, she decided that Pickleball Guesthouses would be the perfect means for combining her love of pickleball, building relationships, and doing good.
