The University of New Mexico Lobos men's basketball team represents the University of New Mexico in the Mountain West Conference

Mountain West Conference

The Mountain West Conference , popularly known as the Mountain West, is the youngest of the college athletic conferences affiliated with the NCAA’s Division I FBS . The MWC officially began operations in July 1999...

 in the NCAA Division I. UNM established basketball

Basketball

Basketball is a team sport in which two teams of five players try to score points by throwing or "shooting" a ball through the top of a basketball hoop while following a set of rules...

 as a varsity

Varsity team

In the United States and Canada, varsity sports teams are the principal athletic teams representing a college, university, high school or other secondary school. Such teams compete against the principal athletic teams at other colleges/universities, or in the case of secondary schools, against...

 sport in 1899, only eight years after the invention of the sport, but it wasn't until 1920 when they hired a new basketball coach. It was at that point the UNM athletic department became competitive among colleges in the Western United States.
When Johnson arrived in 1920, the school's gym was a small wooden building where the walls were out-of-bounds markers for basketball games.