UTEP will screen Glory Road under the stars at Centennial Plaza on Tuesday, September 8, 2026, at 7:15 p.m., bringing the 2006 Disney film back to the very campus that inspired its story. The free showing arrives during a year loaded with anniversaries: 60 years since Texas Western's 1966 national championship and 20 years since the movie itself hit theaters.
The screening is part of UTEP's Movies on the Lawn series, according to KLAQ, whose reporting on the event forms the backbone of this story. Glory Road tells the story of Texas Western College's run to the 1966 NCAA men's basketball championship, starring Josh Lucas as coach Don Haskins and featuring a cameo appearance from Haskins himself. Parts of the film were shot on the UTEP campus, giving Tuesday's screening an added layer of homecoming.
The movie dramatizes one of college basketball's most consequential nights. On March 19, 1966, Texas Western College defeated top-ranked, all-white Kentucky 72-65 at Cole Field House in College Park, Maryland, capping a 28-1 season, according to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. Haskins started five Black players in that championship game, a decision that made Texas Western's victory a landmark moment in college basketball and helped break down racial barriers in the sport, per KLAQ's reporting.
From Texas Western to UTEP
Texas Western College was officially renamed The University of Texas at El Paso one year after the title run, in 1967. Haskins went on to coach at the school for 38 seasons, from 1961 to 1999, compiling a 719-353 record with 14 NCAA tournament appearances and seven Western Athletic Conference regular-season championships, according to Wikipedia. The university's primary basketball arena, built in 1977 as the Special Events Center, was renamed the Don Haskins Center in 1998 and sits along a campus road named Glory Road.
That layered naming reflects how thoroughly the 1966 championship has been woven into UTEP's physical campus. Centennial Plaza itself, where Tuesday's screening takes place, is an 11-acre pedestrian green space built as part of a $25 million campus transformation project tied to the university's 2014 centennial. It opened in April 2015 and earned SITES Silver Certification for sustainable landscape design the following year.
A Team Still Being Honored Decades Later
The recognition hasn't stopped with campus landmarks. The 1965-66 Texas Western Miners were enshrined as a group into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2007, a decade after Haskins received his own individual induction in 1997. In April 2026, the championship team was inducted into the Texas Sports Hall of Fame — the first time in that organization's 75-year history that an entire team was enshrined as a full squad, according to the Texas Sports Hall of Fame.
UTEP has also poured fresh investment into preserving that history on campus. In January, the university formally opened Texas Western Hall, a $110 million, 124,725-square-foot facility with 30 classrooms and a 150-seat auditorium built to honor the school's historical identity, as Hoodline reported at the time.
Timed to a Growing Student Body
Tuesday's screening also lands amid a period of campus growth. UTEP recorded a student enrollment of 26,297 in Fall 2025, with roughly 85% of students identifying as Hispanic and about half representing first-generation college attendees, figures Hoodline detailed in its coverage of the university's welcome-week programming. Centennial Plaza has increasingly served as the hub for that kind of outdoor student gathering, hosting activities during UTEP's recent Miner Welcome events.
When Glory Road first opened nationwide on January 13, 2006, directed by James Gartner and produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, it grossed $42.9 million against a $30 million budget and won the 2006 ESPY Award for Best Sports Movie, according to Wikipedia. Twenty years later, the free outdoor screening gives students and El Paso residents a chance to watch that story play out again on the same grounds where much of it actually happened.
