WHEELING — Wheeling will be welcoming a new professional team this spring, as the Wheeling Miners look set to debut in the American Arena League with hopes of building an arena football team that can bring a championship to the Friendly City.

“We’re very excited to be in the city of Wheeling for our football team,” Miners co-owner Mac Davis said. “The Miners is a former name of a baseball team that played in West Virginia, and now we’ve taken that name and we’re going to bring arena football back and a championship to the city of Wheeling.

“We’re very excited and we’re happy that the community so far has been with us and supporting us along the way.”

The Miners are set to play an eight-game season from April to June next year, and the team will play their home games at WesBanco Arena.

Davis and Chris Duffy are at the head of an ownership group eager to immerse themselves, and their new team, in the Wheeling community.

“Both Mac and I and the other co-owners as a group, we all agree that it’s very important to get as much community involvement as possible with the team,” Duffy said, speaking on the weekend of Dec. 2. “It is almost like a giant family working together, and it needs to be in order to succeed.

“Next week we’re going to do a little promo to get fan involvement in our uniform designs, and get some input from our Facebook page’s 3,000 friends and countless on the Tik Tok and Instagram pages. Our mascot is nameless still, we plan on letting the fans pick names, and then the winning name will get $100 worth of merchandise of team stuff. Just simple things like that, giveaways, free tickets, prizes, doing things like that with the fan base is important.”

Duffy has been part of ownership groups of other arena football franchises in the past, namely the Carolina Havoc who, as the Atlanta Havoc in 2018, won the AAL Championship in 2018. The team last played in 2019.

“We lost in the semifinals [in 2019], and then COVID hit,” Duffy said. “All my gear, all the stuff has been in storage since. We were looking for a new team, and someone brought to attention that Wheeling needed it.

“We put some feelers out there, we talked to the arena, WesBanco, and they loved the idea. It’s a great partnership and we look forward to continuously working with everybody here.”

The Miners’ first game is a road contest scheduled for April 13, 2024 against the Steel City Stampede, before their home opener against the Jersey Bearcats on April 19 in WesBanco.

Across their social media pages on various platforms, the Wheeling Miners have announced camp invitations and coaching additions, including Mansfield Dinkins III as head coach, and former Cincinnati Bengals players Corey Dillon and Rod Jones on his staff.

Wheeling has impressed Davis with the reception the team has gotten.

“We’ve had a huge response,” Davis said. “We first released our Instagram and Facebook and Tik Tok page, and we’ve had people talk to us about bringing the name back, we’ve had people talk to us about how they find arena football coming back to the city of Wheeling important, we’ve had a really good response so far. A lot of people in the area are very excited for opening day and we’re excited to welcome them.”

Davis himself is familiar with the area, and his enthusiasm for the city and the sport have led him to joining the Miners’ ownership group.

“I love the Wheeling area, I own greyhounds over in Wheeling Island, I’ve always wanted to be in the area, and I’ve always loved football. During COVID I got really into watching some of the smaller leagues, and that’s how I found arena football. I used to go to the Tampa Bay Storm games.

“I connected here with Chris, I found that they were bringing a team to Wheeling, and I thought I had to be a part of that.”

Davis and Duffy said that more announcements for camp invitations, contest announcements and other updates will be released on their social media pages over the coming days.

Preparations are underway for the team to be ready for April. The team recently bought helmets, and they’ve secured a partnership with the McLure Hotel in downtown Wheeling.

“They gave us pretty much everything that is required for a team, a meeting room, an office, rooms to house the players,” Duffy said.

The team is on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and X, and their website can be found at gowvminers.com.

“We’re coming in pretty quickly as time kind of narrows down here,” Davis said. “We’re going to be having a team, hopefully a championship team, come 2024.”

“Wheeling deserves a championship, and that’s our goal, to bring home a championship,” Duffy said.