📍 El Paso, Texas
🏐 Home of UTEP Miners volleyball

An unassuming little barn, Memorial Gym on the campus of the University of Texas at El Paso is a venue that will forever be enshrined in college basketball history. This modest, 5,200-seat arena was the home court for the Texas Western Miners for years – including the legendary 1966 squad that defeated an all-white Kentucky to win the NCAA Tournament – and has also hosted UTEP women’s volleyball for more than half a century.

Memorial Gymnasium opened in late 1961, coinciding with the first season of UTEP basketball coach Don Haskins. Haskins would shatter the glass ceiling of college hoops with his decision to recruit and start African-American players, a move that helped propel the school – then known as Texas Western – to the National Championship game in 1966. UTEP basketball compiled 14 dominant wins at the gym that season, storming to a 28-1 record on their way to the title match. There, the Miners would defeat an all-white Kentucky, led by Adolph Rupp, by the score of 72-65 to clinch the program’s only championship win. Texas Western’s improbable run would later be immortalized in the 2006 film Glory Road.

Around a decade after their moment of triumph, the Miners would move across the street – itself renamed Glory Road to honor the 1966 team – to the Special Events Center, renamed the Don Haskins Center in 1998 to commemorate their legendary leader. That season would be Haskins’ last as UTEP head coach, serving for 33 years in total at the helm of the Miners basketball program.

Women’s volleyball and basketball, meanwhile, both began in 1974 and took up residence right alongside men’s hoops at Memorial Gym. When the basketball teams departed a few years later in 1977, volleyball became the sole sport played at the old venue and has been ever since. Initially, the team had some success, dominating the competition throughout the 1980s as they bounced around conferences and as an independent. After a bit of a down period in the ’90s and ’00s, the Miners experienced some resurgence in the early 2020s, posting two of their three best-ever records in 2021 and 2023.

While volleyball fans continue to turn out here to cheer on their ladies, for college basketball fans, the bleachers and hardwood at Memorial Gym will forever be hallowed ground – a place where history was made and barriers were broken.