EL PASO -- To find the future of UTEP football, you have to drive Northeast up Highway 54, past the Biggs Army Airfield and into the shadow of the Franklin Mountains. There, around the corner from a local taco joint that’s far more comfortable taking your order in Spanish, lies Parkland High School. 

Deion Hankins is an 18-year-old kid still finishing up his high school degree when we sit down to talk in the weight room at Parkland High School on a warm March day. You wouldn’t know it by looking at him. Hankins’ natural curls add another few inches onto an already impressive 6-foot, 212-pound frame as he sits down on a bench in head coach Eric Frontz’s office. He looks every bit the part of a seasoned college football player, and he has yet to take even a collegiate practice snap at this point. 

Parkland is the “melting pot” of Northeast El Paso, as one local put it, mixing a heavy Hispanic population with a sturdy black population just miles up the road from Fort Bliss. The city of El Paso lives within Hankins, mixing both black and Hispanic heritage into a powerful frame. 

Hankins is the pride of Northeast El Paso, and one of the best high school football players ever from the city. He rushed for 7,491 yards, averaged 202.5 yards per game and accumulated 83 all-purpose touchdowns in just 37 games for the Matadors. He had a laundry list of offers from some of the biggest schools in the country. 

But playing at Arkansas or Oklahoma State didn’t fit the plan that Hankins had for himself. It didn’t fit the plan El Paso has for him. And as the city gains a spotlight with locals like singer Khalid, congressman Beto O’Rourke and Green Bay Packers running back Aaron Jones becoming national figures who bring El Paso to the world, Hankins embraces the chance to become a local hero too. 

“He wanted to have an impact on the young people of El Paso,” UTEP coach Dana Dimel said. “He wanted to be able to get out and have an impact on them and be an influence on them. That was a big part of why he wanted to stay home.”