Back in 2004 there were few appealing options for adult recreational teams seeking a safer and more rewarding hockey experience, especially in the 35-plus age group. There were commercial leagues, many of them badly run, which offered a toxic mix of late game times, indifferent officiating and lax attention to player discipline. And then there were privately run leagues, usually operating out of city rinks, which rarely accepted new teams.

Fed up with successive years of shabby treatment playing in one the largest commercial adult leagues in the country, the Team Manager of the Etobicoke Wings, Stephen Shaw, decided to take destiny into his own hands by forming a new league aimed at players 40 years of age and older. Through a stroke of luck, he managed to find available ice time at the old Lakeshore Memorial Arena on Monday evenings. He made an immediate commitment to secure two hours of ice and then went looking for other teams. After knocking on the dressing room doors of teams enrolled in an Etobicoke-based commercial league, he soon found three willing defectors: the Olden Hawks, run by Kevin Day; Quick-X (now called the Raiders), headed up by Wayne Toyama; and a team called the Oilers (now defunct) which was managed by Norm Johnston. In August 2004 the Tetrad Hockey League was formed made up of those four founding members.

The first puck dropped on September 20th, 2004 in a game between Quick-X and the Olden Hawks. Over the next four seasons, the League expanded to six teams. In 2009 the MasterCard Centre opened and the League was able to secure an additional hour of ice time, enabling it to expand to eight teams which remains the current configuration.