Greensboro Mayor W.H. Sullivan first proposed the arena in 1944 as a memorial to soldiers who fought in the two world wars. Fifteen years later, on October 29, 1959, the new Greensboro Coliseum welcomed its first event with 7,100 seats - one of the largest arenas on the East Coast at the time. By 1993 it had grown to 22,000. In October 2024, First Horizon Bank paid for a ten-year naming-rights deal, and the building everyone in North Carolina had simply called the Greensboro Coliseum for 65 years became First Horizon Coliseum. The marquee changed. The basketball memory did not.
The Atlantic Coast Conference has played its men's basketball tournament here 26 times since 1967 - more than any other venue, by a margin no other building can plausibly catch. Geography explains most of it. The arena was within a seven-hour drive of the original ACC footprint and within an hour of most of the conference's heartland in North Carolina. From the 1960s through the 1980s, North Carolina, Duke, and NC State played neutral-site games here against marquee opponents because the home gyms could not hold the demand. The Coliseum hosted 14 NCAA Division I men's tournaments, including the 1974 Final Four where NC State won its first national championship, and the 2012 first-round game in which Lehigh upset Duke. The men's tournament will return in 2027 in a new rotation with Charlotte's Spectrum Center: First Horizon gets it in odd-numbered years.
For thirty years - from 1959 to 1989 - Wake Forest played a portion of its home schedule at the Coliseum because the on-campus Winston-Salem Memorial Coliseum was too small for marquee games. In practice Wake Forest played most of its ACC games at Greensboro. The opening of the much larger Lawrence Joel Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Winston-Salem in 1989 finally let the Demon Deacons go home full-time. Since 2010 the UNC Greensboro Spartans men's team has played here, with most of the upper deck curtained off for a working capacity of about 7,500. The Big Four Tournament - North Carolina, Duke, NC State, Wake Forest - ran from 1971 to 1981, played here. The MEAC tournament has been here ten times. The Southern Conference tournament called this home from 1996 to 1999.
Greensboro has had professional hockey since 1959 - the Generals of the Eastern League, the Generals of the Southern League, then the Monarchs of the ECHL and the Carolina Monarchs of the AHL. Then came the strange two years. When the Hartford Whalers relocated to North Carolina in 1997 as the Carolina Hurricanes, their permanent arena in Raleigh was not built yet. They leased the Greensboro Coliseum for two seasons. The arrangement was unhappy. Greensboro fans, hit with NHL ticket prices for a team they knew was leaving, mostly did not come. Raleigh fans did not want to drive an hour west on I-40 to see a team that was supposed to be theirs. The Hurricanes drew some of the smallest NHL crowds since the 1950s. During the 1998-99 season the team curtained off most of the upper deck to hide what national media called green acres of empty seats. The Hurricanes moved to Raleigh. The Greensboro Generals came back in the ECHL, lasted to 2004, folded. In October 2024 the ECHL awarded Greensboro a new expansion franchise. They are called the Gargoyles. They began play in the 2025-26 season.
Elvis Presley played the Coliseum on April 14, 1972. Footage from that night ended up in his last film, Elvis on Tour, which won the Golden Globe for Best Documentary the following year. He came back to play here on April 21, 1977. Four months later, on August 16, he was dead. The Monkees were the first major rock act to play the building. Phish set the all-time attendance record on March 1, 2003, with 23,642 fans. Casting Crowns recorded their live album Until the Whole World Hears... Live here on April 24, 2010. American Idol auditioned its season 5 here in October 2005. The X Factor came through in July 2012. The Coliseum has been - for a building in a mid-sized southern city - a remarkable accumulator of cultural events that should have happened somewhere larger.
The Coliseum has been rebuilt three times around its original core. In 1968 Greensboro voters approved expansion from 9,000 to 15,500 seats; construction wrapped in 1972. In 1978 the Special Events Center was added on the side as the Exhibition Center, with three exhibition halls and eight meeting rooms. In 1991 manager Jim Evans proposed adding a third tier; construction started in 1993, pushing capacity to 23,000. Late-2010s renovations brought it back down to about 20,000. The complex now anchors a campus with the 4,500-seat mini-arena, the Aquatic Center, the ACC Hall of Champions Museum (opened March 2011 because the ACC was founded in Greensboro in 1953), and the 300-seat Odeon Theatre. The city subsidizes operations to the tune of about $2 million a year - the cost of keeping the basketball cathedral and the concert hall and the convention space all in the same building, lit up most nights of the year.
First Horizon Coliseum sits at 36.060N, 79.826W on West Gate City Boulevard in southwest Greensboro, North Carolina. The complex is unmistakable from the air - a clustered group of arena, mini-arena, exhibition halls, and Aquatic Center surrounded by parking. Field elevation about 850 ft MSL. Piedmont Triad International (KGSO) is about 6 nm northwest; Smith Reynolds (KINT) is about 18 nm west-northwest. From 2,500-4,000 ft AGL the Coliseum, the I-40/US 29 interchange, and the UNC Greensboro and Bennett College campuses all read clearly. The building hosts ACC, NCAA, and ECHL events from October through April, and concerts much of the year.