Kentucky basketball sets another game on the schedule. This one honors a UK trailblazer.
Yet another piece to the Kentucky men’s basketball schedule for the upcoming 2022-23 season was announced Wednesday morning, and this game will honor the memory of a UK icon.
The Wildcats will host Florida A&M on Dec. 21 in Rupp Arena for the second installment of the program’s “Unity Series” that launched last year. The series seeks to increase awareness of the missions of historically black colleges and universities and to raise funds to provide opportunities for students at those institutions.
This will be the second of five consecutive seasons of games against programs from the Southwestern Athletic Conference. Last year, Kentucky defeated Southern University — coached by former UK point guard Sean Woods — by a score of 76-64, and the Cats led by just four points at halftime of that game.
Southern went on to finish third in the SWAC last season, two games behind first-place Alcorn State. This season’s opponent, Florida A&M, was another game back in fourth place, finishing the season with an 11-7 league record.
With this game, Kentucky will honor Reggie Warford, who passed away in May at age 67.
Warford was a standout player for Drakesboro High School in Muhlenberg County before becoming Joe B. Hall’s first recruit ahead of the 1972-73 season.
He ultimately became the second Black player in UK men’s basketball history and the first to play all four seasons with the Wildcats and graduate from the university.
Warford was the only Black player on the 1972-73 roster, and he was joined the next season by Larry Johnson and Merion Haskins, with Jack Givens and James Lee coming in 1974 and Truman Claytor and Dwane Casey joining the program in 1975.
Those who came after Warford have expressed their gratitude and stressed his importance in integrating the UK program. Givens, one of the greatest players in program history, earlier this year called Warford a “trailblazer” and “the big brother to all of us who came after him.”
“It needed to be someone who had a lot of confidence,” he said. “Not just in his athletic ability, but confidence in who he was.”
Two years after Warford’s final season, Givens led UK to the national championship — the program’s first title in two decades — with Lee and Claytor also among the team’s top players.
Warford scored 206 points in his Kentucky career, playing sparingly his first three seasons before emerging as a key player on the 1975-76 squad, averaging 22.7 minutes per game for a team that finished with a 20-10 record and won the NIT championship.
In 2019, he was inducted into the KHSAA Hall of Fame.
Warford earned a master’s degree in education from Murray State after earning his bachelor’s degree from UK, and he was later an assistant coach at Pittsburgh, Iowa State and Long Beach State. He was at Pitt at the same time as John Calipari, who was 26 years old when he joined the coaching staff alongside Warford.
Two days before last year’s inaugural “Unity Series” game, players and coaches from the Kentucky and Southern University programs gathered for a tour of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, a trip that left an impression on both head coaches.
“I needed about another three hours because it was educational, and the people that were there were unbelievable,” Calipari said.
With Wednesday’s announcement, the full 2022-23 schedule for the Wildcats is nearing completion, with only a handful of games yet to be confirmed. Last week, the Southeastern Conference released the full league schedule for this season.
UK also confirmed Tuesday that the Cats will host reigning Ivy League champion Yale on Dec. 10 and that Big Blue Madness will be held Oct. 14 in Rupp Arena, with the campout for tickets returning the weekend of Oct. 1.
This story was originally published September 14, 2022 at 10:00 AM.
