SLIPPERY ROCK — There wouldn’t be a rock on the Slippery Rock University campus if not for the actions of a Cabot man and his colleagues 51 years ago.

The rock, or rather the nearly 10-ton, 5-foot-tall boulder is located on the south end zone in SRU’s Mihalik-Thompson Stadium.

Every football player touches it for good luck before kickoff. Cheerleaders lay hands on it after every score.

But the good luck piece would now be resting under water if John Woitas and his fellow pledges hadn’t had a brainstorm in the spring of 1965.

Woitas, 70, who retired in 2003 after 35 years as a math teacher at Kiski Area High School, said bringing the rock to campus was a pledge project of his Sigma Pi pledge class.

Woitas said, “We knew we had to come up with a pledge project. Ideas were being thrown around.”

“Someone said, ‘Where is the rock in Slippery Rock?’ and we decided we has to bring a rock to Slippery Rock,” Woitas said.

Woitas, three of his fellow pledges and a Sigma Pi brother drove to the Kinzua Dam site along the Allegheny River in Warren County.

Woitas said one of the pledges had an “in” with the excavating company at the dam.

“They were just building it then. Where the dam is now, at the base of the earthen dam, they had three rocks for us to pick from,” said Woitas. “The one we picked, we just decided it had character.”

According to Woitas, another Sigma Pi member’s father owned a trucking company and agreed to haul the rock to campus.

From 1965 to 1988, the rock was in the old Thompson Field where the football team practiced until the team moved to Mihalik-Thompson Stadium in 1974.

It would be 14 years before the rock rejoined the team. It was relocated to its current location by the 319th Army Engineer Unit from Butler in 1988.

“It’s right there on the football field,” said Woitas. “It kind of gets celebrated at every home game.”

And before games, too, according to George Mihalik, the longtime Slippery Rock University football coach.

“Currently, the tradition of the rock is after Friday practice the team would gather around the rock and I would climb up on the rock and talk about the upcoming game,” said Mihalik, who retired in 2015.

“We’d place our hands on the rock and have a break,” he added.

“On game day at home games, the whole team will funnel past the rock,” Mihalik said.

“It’s a symbol of who were are. Nothing can break the rock,” Mihalik said.

But it hasn’t always been held in such high regard by Slippery Rock opponents.

“It used to be vandalized all the time. Things have kind of calmed down now,” said Woitas. “I can’t tell you how many times it got greased. I guess to make it a slippery rock.”

“And before a game with Indiana (Pa.) University, it got painted maroon and slate, Indiana’s colors,” said Woitas.

Woitas sees the rock at every home football game Slippery Rock plays because his granddaughter, Shawna Sefton of Cabot, is an elementary education major and a member of the Marching Pride band.

In fact, his daughter, Kelly Campman, also graduated from SRU in 1994 and is a chorus/music teacher in Myrtle Beach, S.C.

The rock would be a legacy for the group of us. But my legacy would be my daughter and granddaughter going to Slippery Rock,” he said.