UTEP volleyball christened a freshly renovated Memorial Gym on August 30 with a five-set thriller over rival New Mexico State, winning 3-2 in front of a sold-out crowd of 3,176 fans at the arena El Paso locals call Club Memorial. The win capped a $1.6 million transformation of the building where Don Haskins once paced the sideline, connecting a program on the rise to a gym that has anchored campus athletics since 1961.
The renovation was made possible by a $1 million lead gift from El Paso dentist and UTEP alumnus Dr. Bob McFadden, according to UTEP Athletics. It stands as the largest single donation to a women's sport in UTEP Athletics history, and it helped the university's Club Memorial fundraising project surpass its original $1.5 million goal, ultimately topping $1.6 million by April.
Among the upgrades: new Taraflex competition flooring, LED lighting, an upgraded sound system, enhanced MinerVision production equipment, new lower-level chairback seating and additional fan-experience improvements. The Taraflex surface in particular meets the standard required for UTEP to host conference volleyball postseason tournaments, per the athletic department's own release.
A Gym Built for Basketball, Reborn for Volleyball
Memorial Gym opened for the 1961-62 basketball season, completed just days before that year's home opener, according to the El Paso Times. The building, located on the UTEP campus, held 4,300 seats and replaced the Coliseum, where Texas Western College had previously played its home games. It was there that Don Haskins started the first of his 38 seasons at the helm of the Texas Western men's basketball program in 1961.
Texas Western's 1961-62 squad, an 11-man varsity team that Haskins later said lacked much height, opened that first season at Memorial Gym on December 8, 1961, against the Phillips “66” Oilers — a team sponsored by the Phillips Petroleum Company and based in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. The Oilers won 97-75, handing the Miners a loss in the very first game played inside the new gym, after Texas Western had returned from a three-game opening road trip. The El Paso Times report notes Haskins recalled that squad's makeup in later years, describing the challenges of that debut roster.
Haskins' Philosophy Took Root Inside Its Walls
Haskins, trained under legendary coach Henry Iba, built his program on tough defensive play, a disciplined and patterned offense, and fundamentals — telling players to avoid mistakes and bad shots, per the same account from the El Paso Times. He also believed that practicing on the home court carried a competitive edge, saying familiarity with a gym's angles and background could translate into extra points per game, and that playing in an unfamiliar gym could feel like playing away from home.
Those principles paid off during the 1965-66 season, when Haskins led Texas Western to a 28-1 record with home games at Memorial Gym, culminating in the Miners' 72-65 victory over Kentucky on March 19, 1966 — a national championship won by fielding the first all-Black starting five in an NCAA Division I title game, according to background compiled from Wikipedia. Texas Western was renamed UTEP not long after that championship season.
Haskins went on to retire in 1999 with 719 career wins and was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame as a coach in September 1997. He died in El Paso in September 2008 at age 78. Basketball itself moved out of Memorial Gym in 1977, relocating to the newly built Special Events Center, which was renamed the Don Haskins Center in September 1997 — a venue later covered by Hoodline's concert-tour coverage for its far larger capacity of nearly 11,659 permanent seats.
Volleyball's Rise Justified the Investment
Even after basketball departed, Memorial Gym never went quiet. Women's volleyball has called the building home since 1974, and the program's recent success helped justify pouring $1.6 million back into it. UTEP volleyball earned its first-ever NCAA Division I Tournament berth in December 2024 after a 27-5 regular season, a milestone Hoodline detailed in its own report on the team's historic tournament breakthrough. That followed a run to the championship match of the National Invitational Volleyball Championship in December 2023, where the Miners fell to Wichita State.
Heading into this season, UTEP volleyball is chasing a third consecutive NCAA tournament appearance, building on momentum that included a sweep over Oral Roberts covered in Hoodline's report on the team's non-conference performance last September. The timing of the Memorial Gym renovation lines up with another major shift: UTEP officially joined the Mountain West Conference on July 1, ending a 21-year run in Conference USA and restoring old regional rivalries with schools like New Mexico and Wyoming.
The move to the Mountain West arrived alongside UTEP's broader Reach the Peak campaign, which set targets of expanding the Miner Athletic Club to 2,500 donors and lifting season ticket sales across all sports to 10,500. Those fundraising efforts were bolstered by a separate $2.5 million pledge from local philanthropists, according to UTEP Athletics' announcement of the conference transition.
A Living Connection to 1966
The gym's dual identity — working volleyball venue and civil-rights-era landmark — was on full display earlier this year when UTEP marked the 60th anniversary of the 1966 title with a free public screening of the Disney film Glory Road inside Memorial Gym on April 1, featuring actor Schin Kerr. Hoodline covered a related outdoor anniversary screening in its recent piece on UTEP's 60-year title tribute. Together, the renovation and the anniversary events underscore how a gym built for one era of Miner basketball has become the enduring stage for another sport's championship ambitions.
