Hockey Team Identity Project: Wheeling Nailers

Because I'm a silly goose, I retweeted Captain Hammer's latest HTIP, but never cross posted it here. But, it's a story about not only intertwining history, but also how the team had to change it's name for some reason.

The team began in 1981 as the Carolina Thunderbirds out of Winston-Salem, North Carolina. At the time they were part of the now-defunct Atlantic Coast Hockey League.The Thunderbirds moved to Wheeling, West Virginia in 1992. Apparently then there was a copyright dispute with the Seattle Thunderbirds. This seems quite strange to me, the Wheeling Thunderbirds' logo was nothing like Seattle's, and teams share names all the time--Rangers, Bruins, Wolves, Chiefs, and Americans just to name a few--so I don't know what the dispute was.

To find out how the new name was gotten and how it ties into the city of Wheeling-- click this direct link for it all. I'm sad to see it wasn't named after my former accounting teacher at MSJ, Jerry Naylor. If it had, the shoulder patches would have "Debit" on the left shoulder and "Credit" on the right shoulder.