Former Western Kentucky women’s basketball coach Paul Sanderford is one of three with WKU connections that were named Wednesday to the 2015 class of the Kentucky Athletics Hall of Fame. 

Sanderford is joined in this year’s class by former Lady Topper Sharon Garland and former WKU basketball manager Lloyd Gardner.

In his 26-year career as a head coach at WKU, Nebraska and Louisburg College, Sanderford won 616 games and had a career winning percentage of .748. As a Division I coach, he was 453-189.

Sanderford amassed 365 victories and a .753 winning percentage as Lady Topper head coach from 1982-97, posting 13 seasons with 20-plus victories during his 15-year stint as head coach. That includes a school-record 32 victories during the 1985-86 season. 

He also led the Lady Toppers to 14 postseason appearances, including 12 NCAA Tournaments and the program’s three Final Four trips in 1985, 1986 and 1992. The 1992 squad advanced to the championship game against Stanford. 

The Lady Toppers won 15 NCAA Tournament games under Sanderford’s direction, advancing to at least the Sweet Sixteen four times. 

WKU claimed five Sun Belt Conference regular-season championships and seven league tournament titles under Sanderford. He earned Sun Belt Coach of the Year honors three times (1982-83, 1985-86 and 1990-91), while coaching seven different All-Americans.

Sanderford returned to the WKU sidelines for four seasons (2003-07) as an assistant coach on Darrin Horn’s men’s basketball staff. 

Garland lettered for the Lady Toppers in 1981, scoring 393 points. Garland is a high school legend in the state of Kentucky, having earned a spot in the Kentucky High School Basketball Hall of Fame in 2013. 

Garland helped Laurel County win three state championships, leading the team in scoring in all three championship games. 

No other player in girls’ state tournament history has ever won three state championships and led their team in scoring all three games. 

She was a three-time All-State selection before playing at Kentucky and WKU. Garland lettered at Kentucky in 1980 before joining the Lady Topper roster.

Gardner served as a WKU basketball manager, lettering in 1964 through 1967, and serving for coaches Ed Diddle and John Oldham. 

After graduation in 1967, he volunteered part-time for the Kentucky Colonels of the ABA and was a teacher for Jefferson County Public Schools. 

During the 1970-71 season he returned to the Colonels full-time until the league shut down. During his career Gardner has accumulated five championship rings: 1975 Kentucky Colonels, 1983 Kentucky Bourbons Professional Softball, two as an assistant coach on Fairdale’s 1990 and 1991 back-to-back state champion basketball teams and in 1994, as the head coach, he guided Fairdale to its third state title in five years.

Following a 19-year tenure as an assistant coach and 14 years as head coach, Gardner ended his time at Fairdale but is still the director of the prestigious King of the Bluegrass Holiday Classic at Fairdale that began in 1981.