OCEANSIDE -- After more than 60 years of playing sports and raising money for teams and clubs around North County, the Oceanside Girls Athletic Club has disbanded, giving the last of its money to four area sports organizations.

The club, founded in 1946, started as a group of mothers and daughters who wanted to play softball. The next year, they added a bowling league, said Eileen Miller, who joined the club in 1960 as a bowler.

"It kept us going and kept us young. And it was a great group of gals," said Miller, who is now 82. "We all kind of clung together as we had our babies and grew older."

But in the last few years, she said, the club turned into more of a purely social group than a sports organization. "We don't bowl or play softball anymore," she said. "We're all in our 60s, 70s and 80s, you know."

One member, Naomi Dixon, is in her 90s. She was one of the original 25 ladies who founded the club. She said that club members used to travel throughout Southern California competing and held silent and white elephant auctions to raise money for local charities and other sports clubs.

At its peak in 1958, the club had 14 bowling teams. But by the late 1990s, only a few of its bowlers were still active.

"It was a little sad that (the club) would end up dissolving, but I knew for a couple of years that we weren't doing as much fundraising as we used to," said Dixon, who at nearly 96 years old only stopped bowling about eight years ago.

When the club broke up, its 14 members gave its remaining funds to four local sports organizations: the Girls Soccer Club of Oceanside Under 16 team, the Oceanside High School girls softball team, the North County Special Olympics and Happy Barrels Surf, which gives surf lessons to the disabled. Each group received $500.

Roxane Thompson, director of strategic partnerships for North County Special Olympics, said the donation came as a surprise. "It was like a gift from heaven," she said. "I had never heard of this great club before. But as I learned about it, it was just like that movie 'A League of Their Own.' "

Thompson said the money goes directly into a fund for the athletes and their sports programs. She said that coincidentally -- and fittingly -- the donation came during softball season.

Miller said that club members plan to keep meeting every Tuesday for lunch at Ocean's Eleven Casino in Oceanside. The club's memorabilia will be donated to the Heritage Park Museum.

"It's something to look forward to," Miller said, "instead of sitting on the couch feeling sorry for ourselves."