The 84th annual Carolina Cup will take place on March 31 and organizers say this will be the last year for the College Park section, which is specifically designed for college students.
"The handwriting is on the wall. And we'll rename it and we'll repurpose it and we'll try to attract a different type of crowd," John Cushman said.
The Executive Director of the Carolina Cup Racing Association, John Cushman, said this will be the final year for College Park.
"We went from 100 tents and last year we went from about 50 tents and now this year we've got about 20 or 25 tents sold," he said.
Cushman created the college student section about 20 years ago which at times brought in dozens of Greek organizations and upwards to 25,000 students from universities throughout the southeast. Clark Joseph is a member of Kappa Alpha Order at the University of South Carolina and has attended the steeplechase event for years, but said his fraternity has stayed away from College Park.
"It's an all-day drinking event, so the possibility of people acting obscurely is a lot higher, but why we haven't gone as a group, just the possibility of one person ruining the whole fun for the group. If one person were to get in trouble we would all get in trouble as a whole as well, so it's just easier to leave that off the list of social functions," he said.
Camden Police Chief Joe Floyd said over 150 officers monitor the event.
"We use a variety of agencies and based on that our mere numbers of people on the grounds along with the focus of the underage drinking being that of SLED. SLED has increased their numbers over the years from probably less than a dozen to an excess of 30 and so it has been a significant effort on our part to be able to manage that large crowd," he said.
Floyd said there are typically between 20-30 arrests and 150 drinking tickets that are given out each year.
In 2014 there were 240 citations, 185 of which were given to minors in possession of alcohol.
Cushman said they will lose some revenue, but the cost of maintaining College Park is expensive and other areas of the event have already sold out.
"In any business if you're not changing, you're dying and so this is an opportunity for us to look at the event and take a new turn," he said.