Before leaving for a weekend tournament, we post two pieces of paper on the bulletin board in the locker room.
One is a detailed itinerary for the weekend: departure times, match schedules, restaurants we'll go to, and what hotel we're staying at. The other is the rooming list of which players are sharing a hotel room.
Can you guess which is more popular?
If I don't have the rooming list up in time, I'll undoubtedly have text messages from players wondering what's going on. If I don't have the itinerary up in time, nobody will notice.
Part of it is an educational process, teaching players to take ownership of our schedule. But it's vastly more important to realize that players usually don't care as much as you do about things like match-ups or rankings. They care about who they're sharing a room with.
They wouldn't say it this way, but they care about community.
Johan Dulfer has some simple ideas about community-building in his book, A Program with Purpose.
Amber Warners shared similar ideas in an interview a few months ago.
And M. Scott Peck's The Different Drum is a classic work on the subject.