The Funniest Name in Football : Colleges: Slippery Rock officials know it could be worse. The school could have been named Wechachochapohka.

“Some people don’t believe we exist. They think the name is made up, that it’s some kind of a joke,” said Robert Aebersold, 53, president of Slippery Rock University.

Yes, there really is a Slippery Rock U. It’s 100 years old this year, a 600-acre campus in the Western Pennsylvania countryside 50 miles north of Pittsburgh, with a student body numbering 7,500.

Announcements of football scores at halftimes throughout the nation often include Slippery Rock’s. Everybody in the stands laughs or cheers at the mention of the name. Slippery Rock scores also are broadcast on radio and television and listed in newspapers.

For a small school--its teams compete in Division II of the National Collegiate Athletic Assn.--its name has nationwide recognition going back to the 1920s because of the football phenomenon.

In 1936, for instance, there was a big controversy over which school had the best football team in the country. The Associated Press said it was Minnesota. United Press said it was Pittsburgh.

One sportswriter in a tongue-in-cheek story, said that both news services were wrong, that it was Slippery Rock because “the Rock” had defeated Westminster, which had beaten West Virginia Wesleyan, which defeated Duquesne, which had won over Pitt, which had beaten Notre Dame, which had defeated Northwestern, which had knocked off Minnesota.

The story was reprinted in papers all over America.

“That recognition makes it rough on our football teams,” said John Carpenter, Slippery Rock’s director of sports information. “Coaches of opposing teams remind their players that the Slippery Rock score is going all over the country. ‘Beat the Rock. Humiliate the Rock. Make us look good when the Slippery Rock score is announced,’ the coaches tell their players. They get their teams fired up far beyond normal and it works against us.

“It’s ironic. We’ve grown up with the name. It’s not funny to us.”

But the school does capitalize on the name everybody laughs about. The school’s bookstore does a land-office business in Slippery Rock T-shirts, sweat shirts, mugs, bumper stickers, license plate brackets, banners, you name it.

“We do $2.5 million in sales a year and a lot of that is from a tremendous mail-order business and from people passing through the area who drop by just for fun to purchase Slippery Rock memorabilia,” said Tom McPherson, 39, manager of the bookstore.

“I had a phone call from Australia this morning, somebody wanting to buy anything with Slippery Rock on it. There are Slippery Rock fan clubs all over the country that buy from us. These aren’t alumni, just people crazy about the name.”

Actor Martin Sheen, he recalled, happened to see a highway sign with Slippery Rock on it and drove over to buy some things.

Aebersold, the school’s 13th president and a longtime professor of physical education here, has no problem with the name.

“Instant recognition,” he allowed.

He passes out shiny, slippery gray rocks, simply inscribed “Slippery” as a souvenir to visiting dignitaries to the campus.

The school’s alma mater says:

“Where the Slippery Rock Creek wanders “With its sparkling falls, “There in stately grace and beauty, “Stands old Slippery Rock halls.” The name goes back to colonial days, when the militia was routed by a band of Seneca Indians. The militia, wearing boots, ran through the waters of a creek, trying to escape. The Indians chasing them wore moccasins. The Indians slipped and fell on the slippery rocks under the water. The militia got away. After that the Indians called the creek Wechachochapohka --Slippery Rock.

The town of Slippery Rock took its name from the creek and in 1889 James E. Morrow, grandfather of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, the widow of aviator Charles Lindbergh, opened the Slippery Rock school with 168 students.

“It’s a good thing the school wasn’t called Wechachochapohka,” said a smiling Ken Lyttle, 61, director of university relations. “Nobody would ever remember its name, let alone know how to pronounce it.

“The rocks the Indians slipped on are still in the stream and they’re still slippery,” he added.

The school colors are green and white, the Rock is the school’s nickname and Rocky is the mascot.

“We have the only damn mascot in the world, so far as we know, dressed as a rock,” Lyttle said.

Last year was Slippery Rock’s first winning football season since 1984 but its baseball team finished third in the Division II College World Series earlier this year. The best known athlete ever to come out of the school is Stan Dziedzic, a national wrestling champion who won a bronze medal at the 1976 Montreal Olympic Games.

Although Slippery Rock is the outstanding example, Pennsylvania has several universities and colleges with unusual names. There are Kutztown, Frostburg, and Shippensburg, of course, but two of the really different ones are California University of Pennsylvania and Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

California University of Pennsylvania?

Yep. Strange as it may seem. Cradled at the edge of the picturesque town of California--population 2,500--on a bend in the Monongahela River in the foothills of the Laurel Mountains is California University of Pennsylvania, founded in 1852.

The town was founded in 1849 by a group of people from the East who had started out for the gold camps in California. They liked the Monongahela Valley so well that they forgot about the gold and settled, then puckishly named their settlement California.

“People are always asking, ‘Are you a branch campus for a California school?’ ” said Beth Baxter, public relations director for the school. “‘Oh no, no, no,’ I tell them. We have nothing to do with the state of California.”

John P. Watkins, 57, president of the school for the last 12 years, said he told a group of Californians at a national meeting of university presidents, “I am the president of the oldest California university in America.”

“Cal” is the logo on the football helmets. The school colors are black and red and the nickname of the teams is the Vulcans, because of the steel industry in the area, but the school bookstore recently received a shipment of T-shirts, sweat shirts and jackets emblazoned with a bear in UCLA’s colors waving a “Cal U” banner. The store had a sale on the wrong-colored wearing apparel, of course.

There are no Californians from the state of California at Cal U. this semester, no surfers here. But an annual tradition is a “good old California beach party” on tons of sand hauled to the campus by trucks. Continuing the California theme, the school has an excellent drama department and Hollywood is the name of the local theater.

California is also a Division II school but it has produced some athletes who became pros. Terry O’Shea, rookie tight end for the Steelers, is a graduate. So is Perry Kemp, wide receiver for the Green Bay Packers. Bruce Dal Canton, pitching coach for the Atlanta Braves, who pitched for the Braves, Pirates and Royals, went to Cal.

And at Indiana?

“We have a real identity problem with our name,” sighed Bill Swauger, news service director at the school.He told of a continuing battle with the media “to please stop referring to us as Indiana (Pa.)”

For the last five years, the school has worked hard to be known as IUP, to give it recognition without confusing it with Indiana University at Bloomington, Ind.

Ironically the school’s president, John Welty, picked up his Ph.D at Indiana University in Bloomington, not in Indiana, Pa.

“People at Indiana University in the state of Indiana have asked us why don’t we change our name to something else, to eliminate the confusion,” Swauger said. “Our answer is, ‘Why don’t you change your name to something else.’ The town of Indiana, the county seat of Indiana County in Pennsylvania, were here long before there was a state of Indiana.”

The university was founded in 1875. It has 13,000 students.

Indiana is the hometown of actor Jimmy Stewart, who went to elementary school on the Indiana University campus when it was a teacher’s college. His statue stands on the lawn of the Indiana County Courthouse.

The late Art Rooney, former owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers, went to school at Indiana. So did Jim Haslett, who played linebacker for the Buffalo Bills, and Billy Hunter, who played shortstop and coached for the Baltimore Orioles.

IUP even has two branch campuses, Indiana University of Pennsylvania at Punxsutawney and Indiana University of Pennsylvania at Kittanning. Now that’s a mouthful. Any conversation involving those schools would be over by the time anyone got the names out.