Indiana University of Pennsylvania Athletics

In May, 1968, couch Bernard Ganley (inducted into the IUP Athletic Hall of Fame this time last year) took his golf team to Bemidji, Minnesota, to compete in the NAIA national tournament.
They brought back the national championship and remain to this day the only IUP team to win an NCAA or NAIA national title. Winning medalist honors (in other words the national individual championship) was senior Rick Hrip.
He accomplished this with a four-day total of 287 as he carded an opening-round 68 and led for the entire tournament by following with scores of 73, 72 and 74. (IUP as a team played so well, winning the tourney by 30 strokes, that Hrip's 74 was thrown out because it was the Indians' highest final-day score.)
Hrip has been winning ever since, as a golfer, 29-year manager for Sprint Telephone, and an individual credited with raising more than $650,000 in behalf of cancer research at Penn State's Hershey Medical Center over the past 17 years.
Since Hrip's 1968 graduation from IUP, and military service in Vietnam, Indiana area golfers and Veterans of Foreign Wars members have been most familiar with his winning 12 VFW state championship tournaments that are played annually in Indiana.
But he has also won 16 club title’s at various country clubs, 27 best-ball and seven individual tournaments in the Greater Harrisburg District Golf Association, four Butler County Opens and a record four titles in the annual Jake Gittlen Memorial Golf Tournament
The latter, considered the best amateur tourney in Central Pennsylvania, is the largest such fundraising event in the country, accounting for more than $4.3 million since 1970, and is the venue through which Hrip became personally involved.
For the past six years, he has been its top individual fundraiser, reporting, for example, totals exceeding $129,000 in 1991 and $140,000 in '97. For his work, Hrip this past spring received a Sprint Community Relations Award as the outstanding individual in such regards as chosen from among Sprint Associates in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois.
With Sprint, the IUP natural sciences graduate who concentrated on mathematics in his studies is employed as staff manager/service costs, responsible for providing cost studies and related cost support for Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
Married to the former Sue Pribulsky since 1980, they have two sons, Andrew, 11, and Max, seven, who both show golfing promise. Not surprising, since Hrip started the Greater Harrisburg Golf Association Junior League in the 1970’s
He has been president of that organization {which extends from Chambersburg to Lebanon) and accepted its Man of the Year award in 1985 for his fundraising for cancer and for his promotion of golf in the Harrisburg area.