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A SALUTARY INFLUENCE the latter organized an athletic association, adopted the inevitable constitution, and announced that they were interested in encouraging all sports.202 Early in 1886 they reorganized, elected Philip M. Bikle as their president, decided to meet once a month, and declared that they were going to make McCreary Gymnasium a much more useful campus facility. Their main object, as announced in the February 1886 issue of the College Monthly, was "general physical culture and not, as is the case in so many colleges, the playing of intercollegiate games of football, base-ball, etc." It was this organization which helped to found the intercollegiate baseball association and which was given the proceeds from the gymnasium fee which the College collected to maintain that facility, but within a very short time its most immediate concern was its own survival.203 For the next four years there are almost no references to it in the College Monthly. The ongoing intercollegiate baseball program was operated by a separate baseball club. In October 1887 the faculty delegated the task of maintaining the gymnasium to the Y.M.C.A.204 The Athletic Association which was revived in the spring of 1890, when there was a definite quickening of interest in sports generally, had a continuous existence through and beyond 1904. For about a decade it administered the intercollegiate athletic program.205 This meant electing team managers, hiring coaches, arranging schedules, trying to maintain student interest, and raising money to pay for the program. Sources of income were initiation fees (until they were dropped in 1900); dues; gate receipts at home games (admission was twenty-five cents); appeals to alumni; and proceeds of fund raising events, such as dramatic productions and "phonographic entertainments." One of the first achievements of the association, in April 1890, was persuading the faculty to change the long-established time of the afternoon class from 4 P.M. to 3 P.M., which gave an extra hour of practice time. 202A baseball association was organized in May 1882. 203In the spring of 1886 the association repaired the bowling alley in the gymnasium and purchased new pins and balls. 204The question of who should care for the gymnasium was settled once and for all when the College relocated the facility in 1890 and began to require work in physical education and hygiene. Perhaps preoccupation with the building program of 1888- 1890 may have had something to do with the lack of interest in the athletic association. 205Before that, the faculty always reserved the right to intervene. For example, in 1895 it decreed that no off-campus games could be played without its permission. The members of the Athletic Association wisely created the three-man alumni advisory committee, which beginning in 1891 consisted of George D. Stahley, Charles S. Duncan, and John B. McPherson, all local men. 35