RIP Frat Beach
Online Athens – The party’s over.
Finally tired of the toll an annual alcohol-fueled party on a St. Simons Island beach associated with the Georgia-Florida collegiate football game has taken on the island and its reputation, Glynn County officials are laying down the law to would-be drunken revelers.
Glynn County commissioners are expected Thursday to approve sending a letter from Glynn County Board of Commissioners Chairman Dale Provenzano to the University of Georgia, as well as to Georgia Southern University in Statesboro and the College of Coastal Georgia in nearby Brunswick — and to high schools in Glynn and surrounding counties — announcing the county’s no-fooling get-tough policy for this year’s Georgia-Florida weekend.
The University of Georgia and the University of Florida are slated to meet this year in Jacksonville, Fla., on Saturday, Oct. 31, a game that is preceded by a massive party held on a St. Simons beach. It’s a largely impromptu event that brings underage drinking, disorderly conduct and other problematic behavior to the island. In the letter, Provenzano says the problems are the result of “the reprehensible activities of a small segment of visitors and locals … .”
In the letter slated for approval Thursday, Provenzano lets officials at the schools slated to receive a copy that the county “will have a ZERO [caps Provenzano’s] tolerance enforcement policy as it relates to underage drinking, disorderly conduct, littering, and other illegal behavior. Violators will be cited on the scene or arrested as an offense warrants.”
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Another day, another tragic death to college life as we knew it. St. Simons Island beach in Glynn County Georgia, better known as Frat Beach when thousands of Dawgs fans poured in year after year for the UGA/UF football game, is officially putting the kibosh on one of the most fun events in all of college traditions. Something about being sick of the trash, the riff raff, the fights and hook ups all over their precious little pristine beaches. Bunch of haters if you ask me.
And yeah you can say oh we can keep this going, we just need to be smarter, get really good fake IDs, be a little quieter. But you know the deal with these type of things. Once the police chief says ZERO tolerance in all caps, and they start making rules like this…
Further delineating the county’s we’re-not-kidding approach to Frat Beach, the letter goes on to say that county police will be checking for age compliance with the state’s alcohol laws, and will be using computers on-site “to confirm a person’s age if an individual has no ID on his or her person.”
Sobriety checkpoints and the timely availability of a magistrate judge for processing people arrested during the weekend will also be components of Glynn County’s plans for reining in Georgia-Florida revelers, according to the letter.
…it’s effectively dead, whether you have the heart to admit it or not. It will gradually fade out over the next few years until it’s nothing but memories, well nothing that you can remember personally due to the blackout, but forever preserved on YouTube.com.