The Wheeling Amateur Hockey Association was formed in 1977.  That brought the PAHL to 11 teams, 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 Wheeling Civic Center was opened in 1977, the same year the amateur program was formed. But that was not what led to the formation of the association, as the building was not originally equipped to host hockey.  The organization originally played 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 in the early 1990s in preparation for an ECHL team to move to Wheeling in 1992.  The building was renamed Wesbanco Arena in 2003.  After a $1.3 million renovation in 2020, the Wheeling Park rink started housing some of the association's teams 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, and since 2012, the amateur organization is a part owner of the ECHL team.