Formal athletics at the college date to 1875, when the first football teams were organized to play against other institutions. In the late 1880s, Ohio Wesleyan had perhaps the strongest amateur baseball team in the state of Ohio behind the pitching of Phil "Lefty" Saylor. The school joined the Ohio Athletic Conference along with Oberlin College, Kenyon College, Ohio State, and Case Western in 1902. In 1983, Ohio Wesleyan joined with nine other colleges in Ohio, Indiana and Pennsylvania to create the North Coast Athletic Conference. The NCAC seeks to bring together a group of liberal arts institutions that value the primacy of the academic mission over the athletic one.