There are two kinds of regions in WeBL. Most managers compete in public regions, which include USA Northeast, USA Southeast, USA West, Canada, United Kingdom, Europe and Independents. These are "free for all" regions open to everybody.
If a group of friends wants to compete with each other, one of them can create a private region when creating a new gym on the registration page. This region will have a password so nobody can join unless invited. Private regions work exactly like public regions, except that fighters in that region can only fight each other. Private regions have their own rankings, press releases, etc.
To use a private region, a player must create a new gym and enter the name and password for that region on the registration page. It is acceptable to create multiple gyms if they are only in private regions. But no user should have more than one gym in public regions.
Note that fighters in a private region can never interact with fighters or gyms in other regions. A private region is completely isolated from all other regions. Furthermore, gyms in private regions cannot "pickup" abandoned fighters. Fighters in a private region will never be promoted to "Contenders". (Otherwise we would see many fixed fights in private regions to create contenders.)
Private regions that are not used for a period of time may be deleted, along with all fighters and gyms, at the Commissioner's discretion (to save disk space).