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Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points. Or at least, I think it’s morning?

Anyway, I’ve been in Hawaii for two days or so, and I still have no idea what time it is. I’m intellectual aware that time zones exist, and my computer says 7:21 PM as I am typing this…but it could be Tuesday as far as I know for all of you guys. Good Whatever Time or Day It Is Right Now. Calendars Are A Lie.

I’m doing more than just hiking craters and drinking pineapple-flavored drinks. I was at the Hawaii/Nevada game on Saturday, will be attending Hawaii’s game at Fresno this Saturday, and am interviewing all sorts of folks over the next few days. You’ll see a variety of ‘Bows related newsletters in the immediate future.

But today, I’m happy to share a different newsletter about teams playing far from home. Today, I’m happy to pass the mic to Colin Deaver, the Director of Creative Strategy for the UTEP Men’s Basketball Program. Colin reached out a few days ago, wanting to pitch a story about an exhibition game UTEP just played….in Mexico.

I’ll turn the time over to him. But first, a word from our sponsors:

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MINEROS EN MEXICO: UTEP plays historic exhibition game in Chihuahua, Mexico

It’s no small secret that autumn Saturdays in America are meant for college football, so you’re forgiven if your eyes haven’t yet been trained on the lead-up to the college basketball season. NCAA hoops teams are used to living in football’s shadow at this point in the year, when exhibition games and closed-door scrimmages are played in relative anonymity, all while gridiron gangs around the nation are simultaneously fighting for pigskin immortality. 

So, last Saturday while much of the nation spent the day on the couch watching football, the UTEP men’s basketball team was out of the country, playing one of the most unique exhibition contests in the history of college hoops against the Universidad Autonoma de Chihuahua (UACH) in Chihuahua, Mexico. 

That’s a big deal, because Chihuahua is considered by many to be the nation’s hoops capital; UACH president Luis Alfonso Rivera even referred to it as Mexico’s, “cathedral of basketball,” before Saturday’s exhibition. UACH plays in the legendary Gimnasio Manuel Bernardo Aguirre (MBA), a 9,600-seat arena that’s also home to Chihuahua’s professional team, Los Dorados de Chihuahua. 

The word, “unprecedented,” probably gets thrown around too much in sports, but this game seems to fit the bill, even though the final score was 111-62 in favor of the Miners. Although the Miners scrimmaged in Juarez, Mexico in the 1970s, UTEP made history as the first American college team to ever play a game in the city of Chihuahua.

 It wasn’t a cake walk to set up; the NCAA typically doesn’t allow its teams to play exhibition games outside of campus sites (there are different rules for the basketball summer foreign tours), and UTEP had to be granted an NCAA waiver to play the game vs. UACH in the capital city of the Mexican state of Chihuahua. The NCAA initially declined the Miners’ bid to play the game, but after UTEP made it clear that they weren’t looking to make any money off of the trip, or do any active recruiting, the waiver was granted. 

UTEP flew into Chihuahua on Friday afternoon, direct from El Paso on a private plane. After going through customs, the Miners were met by a UACH welcome committee, then taken by police escort on a tour around the city. UACH scheduled a variety of events for Friday evening, including a chance for the Miners to see its famous arena, El Gimnasio Manuel Bernardo Aguirre, followed by a gourmet team dinner with dignitaries from both sides. The Miners held a clinic for children on Saturday morning, before tipping off the exhibition game on Saturday night. 

Rivera initially got the ball rolling on Saturday’s basketball game between El Paso’s Miners and Chihuahua’s Dorados, as part of UACH’s 70th anniversary. A native of Chihuahua, Rivera attended law school in Barcelona, Spain, and is a huge sports fan. In addition to a plethora of memorabilia, Rivera also has a regulation basketball hoop hanging in his office. He insisted that UTEP shoot and make a few baskets on the hoop before Friday’s dinner at his house in picturesque downtown Chihuahua. The UACH team played the game in special edition UACH/UTEP jerseys, while UTEP suited up in its gray “Los Mineros” threads. 

The 70th anniversary celebration is also part of a recent, larger initiative between the two universities to work together and find different ways to help each other. UTEP president Dr. Heather Wilson said the two schools are now collaborating on hybrid courses, research and programming. Building relationships with the help of basketball is nothing new for a sport that is fully international at this point. 

“We have a great partnership with UACH in research, teaching, music and now in sports,” said Wilson on the arena floor at halftime of Saturday’s game. “It’s a great way to come together, increase the visibility of UTEP in Chihuahua and in Mexico, and likewise bring students from Mexico to UTEP.”

Located in El Paso, Texas, UTEP resides a stone’s throw from the USA/Mexico border, right across the Rio Grande from Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico.  It makes all the sense in the world for UTEP to embrace UACH, as well as UACJ in Juarez, because of the amount of students that attend UTEP coming from Mexico to go to class. An estimated 1,200 people cross the bridge from Juarez each day, with an even larger number of students moving from Mexico to El Paso full-time to attend the university and El Paso is one of the nation’s hidden gems. 

2.5 million people live in a region that the locals call La Frontera (the Borderland); 1 million reside on the U.S. side and 1.5 million live on the Mexican side. All told, the El Paso/Juarez footprint is as large or larger than major American cities like Cincinnati, Kansas City and Portland. Every day, thousands of people cross the bridge over the river – in both directions – to work, go to school, shop, or visit family and friends. It’s as normal as any daily trip you would see around the world; it just involves crossing an international line. 

That familiarity with life on both sides of the Rio Grande isn’t new to the current edition of the UTEP men’s basketball team. The program that famously was the first team to win an NCAA Championship  starting five black players in 1966 has made three separate trips south of the border in the last calendar year under fourth-year head coach Joe Golding. UTEP watched the Mexican national team play Colombia in Juarez in 2023, then made a trip back to Juarez earlier this month to hold a kid’s clinic and intrasquad scrimmage at UACJ, before the trip 250 miles south to Chihuahua for Saturday’s exhibition game. 

Simply put, Golding doesn’t shy away from growing the university and the game of basketball in Mexico. As a show of good faith, Golding wore a soccer jersey from the Mexican National Team at Saturday’s kid’s clinic in Chihuahua. He’s passionate about the community in El Paso, too, taking the Miners around the city this summer on a tour of a variety of locations. 

“We’ve been building good relationships and we want to continue to build them,” Golding said. We’ve been to Chihuahua, Juarez, and the Bahamas. What basketball can do, it’s just amazing.”

To get to the court requires a walk down a dark, steep staircase to an even darker and steeper tunnel, but the gym itself is a living, breathing basketball museum reminiscent of Gallagher-Iba Arena at Oklahoma State, or Oregon State’s Gill Coliseum. It’s the type of place that can be deafening, even if it’s not full. 

“I wasn’t expecting it to look like this,” senior guard Baylor Hebb said while looking around the cavernous gym on Friday during a short UTEP shootaround at the arena. Every Miners coach and player at some point had to catch themselves taking in the visuals. 

Only four Mexicans have ever played in the NBA; two of them hail from Chihuahua – Jorge Gutierrez and Eduardo Najera. Arguably the most famous Mexican hooper, Najera played 12 seasons in the NBA, before retiring in 2012. Najera was in Chihuahua all weekend as one of the game’s biggest ambassadors. 

He and Miners assistant coach Earl Boykins were teammates on the Denver Nuggets in the mid-2000s, and their relationship also helped set up the exhibition game. The pair shared a big hug when they were reunited for the first time in years at UTEP’s hotel in Chihuahua on Friday afternoon. 

“He looks exactly the same, I’m the one who’s aged,” Najera said with a laugh. “He and I were a perfect fit back in the day when we were teammates, and now we’re trying to translate that (with this game).” 

In addition to attending the game as an honored guest, Najera met up with the Miners for dinner on Friday night at the president’s house, then again on Saturday morning at the MBA for the kid’s clinic. He is beloved in his hometown and you can feel how much he reciprocates it when he talks about the city’s love for basketball. He’s proud of it, and welcoming a college team from the United States was as important to Najera as it was to anyone. 

“I wanted the UTEP players to come in, explore the city and explore the culture. Our people are great and we have great fans. We want to put on a show, the fans love basketball and they’ll be into it,” Najera said. 

Najera was very correct about the last point. The estimated 4,000-5,000 people that attended the exhibition contest showed up in dozens of different jerseys; and they were rowdy, energized and engaged in the action. Every UACH bucket was celebrated with a long, loud cheer, even once the game was out of reach. The fans clearly understood the historical significance of the game. 

UTEP’s athleticism, size and overall talent was superior to UACH’s, which was to be expected for an NCAA Division I team stepping outside the country to play an exhibition game. However, the result of the contest wasn’t really the point. Like Golding said, basketball can build bridges in ways many other things can’t. Hundreds of children will remember forever attending a clinic in their home city hosted by the Miners. Hundreds more will remember meeting the team on the court after the game and a dozen or so besides that will tell stories about waiting for photos outside the UTEP dressing room. Maybe the next NBA player from Mexico was there, forever inspired by what they saw in Mexico’s roundball cathedral. 

“The border divides us, but today, basketball brought us together, “ said UACH president Rivera. “This is a dream that a team from the NCAA like the UTEP Miners with the tradition of the 1966 national champions would come play in our city. It’s more than just a game, it’s a unity between two cities and two histories.”

For the Miners, the exhibition was the beginning of what UTEP hopes is an encore to its run to the Conference USA Championship Game last March. The Miners led Western Kentucky by seven points midway through the second half, before the Hilltoppers rallied to end UTEP’s 2023-24 campaign. 

UTEP’s players have grown accustomed to playing outside of the U.S. lately; the Miners took a foreign tour to the Bahamas in August, a warm-up act for their October trips to Mexico. UTEP is an anomaly in college hoops this season with 10 players returning from 2023-24, so it makes sense in a way that they’d take an anomaly of a trip to open the year. 

“It was pretty amazing to be the first UTEP team to come down to Chihuahua,” said sophomore guard Trey Horton. “The vibes here were great and the hospitality was first-class the whole time we were here.”

Added UTEP senior forward Otis Frazier III: “When you look at the culture and the history of the team, you can see how they love the game of basketball and you can see how they came out to support their team.”

Both UTEP and UACH said that they hope that the game can become an annual event; Golding even proposed playing it in Juarez every other year for the Miners’ “home” site in the hypothetical yearly home-and-home series. UACH’s Rivera also said that in the future, he may extend the invitation to the Gimnasio MBA to other NCAA teams as well. 

Given that it’s Mexico’s basketball cathedral, he may stand a chance of doing so.