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Published May 29, 2025
Georgia AD Josh Brooks reveals facility projects set to 'Slow Down'
Harrison Reno  •  UGASports
Staff

Since taking over as Georgia's athletic director, Josh Brooks has overseen a number of different facility projects. From football to basketball, baseball, softball, and track and field, Brooks has been transforming Georgia's facilities across the board.

However, as he works through his fourth year running the athletic department in Athens, he warned that with the coming changes in NIL, thanks to the still pending House vs. NCAA settlement, work on facilities may take a step back.

“Honestly, I'm glad we got so much done the last four or five years because it's going to slow down as we evolve and money starts shifting more in NIL," Brooks said. “You will see the facilities slow down. Naturally, just because we've got a lot knocked off the list."

When the proposed settlement in the House vs. NCAA case reaches its conclusion, schools will enter into a revenue-sharing agreement with their student athletes. This will call for up to $21 million in revenue from individual schools being used to directly compensate athletes.

With the loss in revenue, schools - Georgia included - will be forced into redoing their budget to account for the revenue that will go to the athletes. Which, as Brooks said Wednesday during his meeting with the media at the SEC spring meetings in Destin, Florida, may mean the facilities arms race in college athletics will "slow down."

This change comes at a relatively good time for Georgia. The 2024 athletic year was the first in which Georgia was able to show many of its most recent facility improvements.

This included the completion of a two-phase renovation project at Sanford Stadium, which saw the opening of the 1929 Club, which offered more premium seating, restrooms, and concession stands on the south side of the stadium. The new Sanford Stadium press box opened in the southwest corner of the endzone as well.

The completion of the Sanford Stadium renovations was quickly followed by baseball and softball. Foley Field underwent a $45 million renovation that saw a turf field installed in addition to the construction of a new locker room, team meeting area, pitching lab, hitting tunnels, and coaches' offices, among other improvements.

Then, for softball, Georgia completed its $38.5 million facility that sits beside Jack Turner Stadium in October. The project provided the program with a state-of-the-art facility, something that Brooks is still intent on providing across all sports.

“One of the focuses for me is always the student-athlete experience," Brooks said of potential future projects. "I want to go to locker room to locker. room, make sure that we've got a couple more areas we need to get touched up. Then I've got to develop my team."

Still left on the to-do list for Georgia is the construction of a new facility for track and field that could wrap as early as the end of the year.

"We've got the track finishing in December, January, and then we'll shift over to the old track becoming practice field parking and all that," Brooks said.

But just because projects will be slowing down, Brooks doesn't intend to do nothing. He revealed his intentions to develop a long-term plan for what comes next for Sanford Stadium, something he hopes can be left for his eventual successor.

“We have to develop a plan for Sanford Stadium, not just for my tenure, but I'm trying to think about the person coming after me," Brooks said. "We want to start putting a comprehensive plan for Sanford together, a five-, ten-, fifteen-, twenty-year plan to where whatever we do builds upon each other to where when I'm gone, the next person comes in and goes, okay, here's the blueprint and how it's going to keep evolving."

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