  In this paper, we determine all irreducible spherical functions \Phi of any K
-type associated to the pair (G,K)=(\SO(4),\SO(3)). This is accomplished by
associating to \Phi a vector valued function H=H(u) of a real variable u, which
is analytic at u=0 and whose components are solutions of two coupled systems of
ordinary differential equations. By an appropriate conjugation involving Hahn
polynomials we uncouple one of the systems. Then this is taken to an uncoupled
system of hypergeometric equations, leading to a vector valued solution P=P(u)
whose entries are Gegenbauer's polynomials. Afterward, we identify those
simultaneous solutions and use the representation theory of \SO(4) to
characterize all irreducible spherical functions. The functions P=P(u)
corresponding to the irreducible spherical functions of a fixed K-type \pi_\ell
are appropriately packaged into a sequence of matrix valued polynomials
(P_w)_{w\ge0} of size (\ell+1)\times(\ell+1). Finally we proved that \widetilde
P_w={P_0}^{-1}P_w is a sequence of matrix orthogonal polynomials with respect
to a weight matrix W. Moreover we showed that W admits a second order symmetric
hypergeometric operator \widetilde D and a first order symmetric differential
operator \widetilde E.
