The Wheeling Amateur Hockey Association was formed in 1977.  That brought the PAHL to 11 members, a quantity that would remain the same until 1990.  Wheeling also gave the PAHL two teams in the state of West Virginia and expanded the footprint of the league westward from what previously was only South Park.  The association remains the western-most member of the PAHL to this day.

The Wheeling Civic Center was opened in 1977, the same year the amateur hockey program was formed. But the new facility was not what led to the formation of the hockey association, as the building was not originally equipped to host hockey events.  The youth organization originally played its home games out of the Wheeling Park Memorial Ice Rink, which had opened in 1962.  The Civic Center eventually became the primary rink used by the program when ice was installed at the venue in the early 1990s in preparation for an ECHL team to move to Wheeling in 1992.  The building was renamed Wesbanco Arena in 2003 and is the only PAHL home rink that also houses a professional hockey team.  After a $1.3 million renovation in 2020, the Wheeling Park rink started hosting some of the association's home games again.

Wheeling's ECHL team went through a name change in 1996, and the Nailers nickname was chosen for the city's long history of nail manufacturing.  The amateur teams adopted the same name that year to also be known as the Wheeling Nailers, and since 2012, the amateur organization has held an ownership stake in the ECHL team.