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The 84th running of the Carolina Cup will be held at Springdale Race Course in Camden on Saturday.<\/p>\n
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John Cushman, executive officer of the Carolina Cup Racing Association, created College Park 22 years ago to give college students a chance to experience the Carolina Cup environment.<\/p>\n
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This is the final year College Park will be open for college students all over the Southeast to attend the annual Carolina Cup.<\/p>\n
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John Cushman shows how expansive the event is with all the different types of participants.<\/p>\n
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Springdale Race Course has only sold 26 tents in College Park for this year’s Carolina Cup.\u00a0 Last year the venue sold 60 tents and 100 tents the year before.<\/p>\n
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CAMDEN, S.C. – Since its opening in 1996, College Park at the Carolina Cup\u00a0has been the hub of Southern culture and a rite of spring for bow-tied\u00a0 fraternity boys and spritely dressed sorority girls all across the Southeast. But after 22 years of live music and steeplechase horse racing, College Park is shutting down.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe did not want this to end. Somebody else did,\u201d said John Cushman, executive officer of the Carolina Cup Racing Association which hosts the event. \u201cI\u2019m just interpreting the numbers and they are shrinking dramatically.\u00a0 We use to sell 100 tents in College Park; last year we sold 60 and this year only 26 tents were sold.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nevertheless, the association has declared 2018 the last year of College Park, which lured thousands of college students for a day of racing and revelry. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Becca Ostien, president of the University of South Carolina\u2019s Alpha Chi Omega chapter, said the shutdown of College Park happened quickly.<\/p>\n \u201cI remember a few years ago Carolina Cup was a huge event for Greek life on campus, but I\u2019m surprised to see how quickly it shrank in just a couple of years,\u201d Ostien said.<\/p>\n This year marks the 84th running of the Carolina Cup, an afternoon of six steeplechase horse races in which over 70,000 people gather annually to throw tailgate parties and watch the events.<\/p>\n So why after over two decades of hosting hundreds of Greek chapters is College Park being shut down?<\/p>\n \u201cI think it\u2019s a combination of a heavy handedness of law enforcement and fraternities telling it\u2019s members that this is a high risk event,\u201d said Cushman, who moved the students out of the infield of the race course \u00a0in the 1990s so they could have their own party space.<\/p>\n Cushman isn\u2019t wrong.\u00a0 The Camden Police Department sends about 150 police officers and 30 SLED officers to the event.\u00a0 On average there are 25 students arrested and put in jail,\u00a0 and over 150 drinking related tickets issued.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m not condoning underage drinking or binge drinking, but this event is policed like nothing I\u2019ve ever seen in my life,\u201d said Cushman.\u00a0 \u201cAll anyone ever wants to talk about is the underage drinking or how many DUI\u2019s there are and last year there were none.\u201d<\/p>\n Ostien said that after years of arrests and tickets, Carolina Cup got the reputation as a binge drinking event, but that\u2019s not the reason for a decline in Greek life attendance.<\/p>\n \u201cGreek life is going through a lot of issues right now, not just at the university, but at a national level too.\u00a0 Greek life is working its way to get back to its roots and shy away from events like this,\u201d \u00a0Ostien said.<\/p>\n Carolina Cup hosted thousands of students in its 22-year run in College Park, but the drastic drop in attendance doesn\u2019t fall just on the shoulders of the fraternities and sororities.<\/p>\n Cushman has received calls from bus companies the association hires, reporting that bus drivers don\u2019t want to work the event for fear of getting cited during S.C. Department of Transportation inspections at the gate.<\/p>\n \u201cThe unpoliced tailgate at Williams-Bryce (Stadium) make this place look like a Boy Scouts jamboree.\u00a0 The buses never get stopped at South Carolina games.\u00a0 Why are the two events different? Because we\u2019re 30 miles away?\u00a0 That pisses me off,\u201d said Cushman.<\/p>\n In its heyday, College Park brought almost 14,000 students on 217 buses the Office of Springdale Race Course reported.\u00a0 \u201cThat\u2019s 14,000 kids not driving.\u00a0 That\u2019s good news that nobody reports,\u201d said Cushman.<\/p>\n Despite launching a marketing campaign to try and bring College Park back to life, Cushman said there was no response and that there was no animosity between College Park and the other sections because they were all separated.<\/p>\n Though attendance in College Park has dwindled the past few years, other sections of the venue are thriving.\u00a0 This year there only 100 spots left for sale of the 2800 that Springdale has available.\u00a0 \u201cIt\u2019s going to be a good event this year, but I\u2019m disappointed College Park is closing because I was the one that created it,\u201d said Cushman.<\/p>\n The name College Park may be gone after this year, but the section will still be there.\u00a0 Cushman said they plan to rename, re-brand and go after a different group.<\/p>\n \u201cWe just want people that want to come and enjoy the event,\u201d said Cushman.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_row][\/et_pb_section]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This is the final year that College Park will be open to college students from across the Southeast during the Carolina Cup.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":48,"featured_media":7296,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"on","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":""},"categories":[39,68],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/carolinanewsandreporter.cic.sc.edu\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7169"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/carolinanewsandreporter.cic.sc.edu\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/carolinanewsandreporter.cic.sc.edu\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carolinanewsandreporter.cic.sc.edu\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/48"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carolinanewsandreporter.cic.sc.edu\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7169"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/carolinanewsandreporter.cic.sc.edu\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7169\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9290,"href":"https:\/\/carolinanewsandreporter.cic.sc.edu\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7169\/revisions\/9290"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carolinanewsandreporter.cic.sc.edu\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7296"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/carolinanewsandreporter.cic.sc.edu\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carolinanewsandreporter.cic.sc.edu\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carolinanewsandreporter.cic.sc.edu\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}