Georgia announces plans to begin alcohol sales at Sanford Stadium in fall

ATHENS, Ga. — Georgia athletics hosted its annual winter board of directors meeting on Wednesday where athletics director Josh Brooks announced plans to start selling alcohol at Sanford Stadium starting this fall.

The move has been years in the making. According to Brooks, the decision was one that the athletics department wanted to wait on until after expansion of the concourse area that occurred prior to the 2023 season. Georgia joins Auburn in making the move recently, meaning that the entire SEC is aligned for in-stadium sales of alcohol.

“We told you, this question’s come up. We wanted to be methodical about it, wanted to take our time to do it right,” Brooks said about the decision. “It wasn’t a race to just do something without proper preparation. I felt like by having a couple years to sell it at Stegeman, do it at baseball last year, we were able to work through some of the logistical challenges of it and be better prepared. It’s not something you want to rush into it. During that same time, we were able to take a lot of notes from our peers, the things that they went through, best practices. I feel we’re ready and prepared to take that on this fall.”

On the topic of preparation, Brooks made sure to mention the protocols that are in place, and have been tested in a way since Georgia implemented the sale of alcoholic beverages at basketball, baseball and softball games. Sales will stop after the third quarter. There will be a limit of two beverages per individual in each purchase. Proper ID of course will be required, and all servers will have been trained for the job.

Brooks described those “best practices” that were observed through the note taking while watching peers around the league. The SEC began allowing sales in 2019. Schools like Vanderbilt, LSU, Tennessee and Texas A&M were among the early adopters. Others joined as the years went along with Alabama doing so in 2022.

“It all started when the SEC first launched it with the policy that you had to pour it in a cup, and what they found is that the timing it takes to do that and the delay it creates,” Brooks said. “Then there’s making sure that you move those sales to areas, you don’t really want to take over your main stands with it. You want the families to still occupy main concessions, so you want to move it to other areas. If you have to walk a little further to get to it, no big deal. It was a lot of logical things.”

“We have seen, talking to our peers across the country that alcohol related incidents have gone down, and we hope with time that this will change people’s behavior,” he added. “The ultimate goal and what you’ve seen nationally is a reduction in binge drinking when individuals know that they can have a drink at a game. That’s the ultimate goal, to hopefully curb that behavior.”

When it comes to price, Georgia’s approach for sales is going to be slightly different than its other concession stand sales. While family friendly pricing has become a point of emphasis at Bulldog games under Brooks’ direction, he doesn’t quite put beer in the same category.

“It’s going to reasonable, but at the same time, in all honestly, as much as we’ve talked about concessions being family friendly and trying to take care of a family of four or five come to a game, this isn’t something where I feel that price or making it ‘cheap’ is important,” Brooks said. “This is a luxury item, not a necessity item, so it’s not going to be something we value price. It will be fair and in line with most of our peers, but this is something we put a thought process on in making it a value item.”

“Because we’ve taken a conservative approach, we feel very ready now — and we were able to learn throughout the years,” Brooks summarized in his presentation on the topic. “Honestly, they (other schools) went through problems, and that’s not to say we won’t have some speed issues, but we’re willing to sacrifice speed to do it right. And I’ll deal with complaints about prices and speed for this, but we’re going to do it responsibly and do it the right way.”