The Don Haskins Center Keeps UTEP Basketball — and the Glory Road Story — at Center Court
Named for the coach of the 1966 national champions, UTEP's arena is home to Miners basketball and one of the most famous stories in American sports.
The Don Haskins Center, on the UTEP campus, is El Paso's principal indoor arena and the home of UTEP Miners basketball. Opened in 1977 as the Special Events Center, it was renamed for Don Haskins, the Hall of Fame coach who led Texas Western College — as UTEP was then known — to the 1966 national championship, one of the most significant games in American sports history.
The building seats roughly twelve thousand for basketball and doubles as the city's large indoor concert and events venue. Its atmosphere on basketball nights is a point of local pride: steep seating, a loud crowd, and a program whose history carries weight far beyond the city's size. The 1966 championship team, which started five Black players against an all-white Kentucky team in the title game, remains central to the university's and the city's identity.
The Miners' basketball tradition runs through the arena's banners and retired honors, and the program's home schedule each winter is one of the constants of El Paso's sports calendar. The women's basketball program shares the building, as do university ceremonies and community events through the year.
The Haskins Center sits within a compact athletics neighborhood on the campus's west side, near the Sun Bowl and Glory Road — the street renamed to honor the story told in the book and film about the 1966 team. Visiting the arena, in other words, means walking through the geography of one of sport's landmark stories.
Event schedules and tickets are published through UTEP Athletics. For El Pasoans explaining their city to an outsider, the Haskins Center usually comes up quickly: it is where El Paso keeps one of its proudest claims on American sports history, still in nightly use.
