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Mark Schlabach, ESPN Senior Writer
The Georgia football team’s roster isn’t the only thing getting a makeover before the 2024 season.
The privet hedges ringing Dooley Field at Sanford Stadium will also be revitalized beginning next month, the school announced Thursday.
The hedges, which cover about 5,000 square feet around the playing field, will be uprooted and replanted with the same lineage of plants that have been in place at Sanford Stadium for 95 years.
The athletic association said the project also would include full soil replacement, irrigation and drainage work.
A school spokesman told ESPN that healthy plants will be replanted with new ones, while unhealthy hedges will be discarded. The athletics association said the hedges, which typically have a lifespan between 20 and 40 years, are about 31 years old.
The project is expected to be completed before the Bulldogs’ G-Day spring game.
It’s not the first time the hedges have been replanted. The hedges had to be removed before Sanford Stadium hosted women’s soccer games during the 1996 Olympics. Before they were removed, cuttings were taken to propagate new plants at various nurseries around the state. They were replaced before the football season that year.
“They’re the sons and daughters of the original hedges,” then-Georgia athletics director Vince Dooley said at the time.