By the way about the geographic region names - first I needed reasonable ways to identify the regions including the states that were in them (Middle Atlantic excludes NY which it technically should include but which has so many players on its own), I might have used Ohio River Valley for example, but Pennsylvania and Ohio are both huge in the numbers of players on their own.
Stagecoach is one of my very favorite movies - the first great John Ford Western with John Wayne, a masterpiece, so no offense is intended to those in the West (though I will change it next season if anyone insists). My sister lives in Denver and would not live anywhere else and I love that city as well and have many friends there.
Texarkana may be a bit too cute, but is the name of an actual town that sits on the border between the two states that comprise the region.
Down the Mississippi is Mark Twain-ish in inspiration.
Appalachia is a region I have lived in at various times in different parts of it (NY - the northern most town of Appalachia is Binghamton, New York where I did my Ph.D. - Pennsylvania (where I lived in the woods), and Kentucky, and I have many close friends from West Virginia. It is a region where people still know things: what plants heal you or make you sick, how to grow stuff, what good music sounds like, what community means, why mountains are beautiful and coal companies not to be trusted.
I could see taking some umbrage at Midwestern Progressive if you are not one. Here I may have gone overboard: my political roots, the people I admire most except for the abolitionists of the 19th century (Frederick Douglass, Wendell Phillips etc.) are the progressives from that region in the early 20th Century: Eugene Debs (Indiana), Robert LaFollette (Wisconsin), the Farm-Labor Party (Minnesota), and so on. So in trying to think of an identity that linked them all (Midwest alone is a gigantic region, stretching arguably from Ohio to Nebraska and the Dakotas, like four Western Europes), this tradition seemed nice to latch onto. But again, I can just change the names to something more innocuous I guess (Northern Midwest ? Great Lakes? - I will think about it).