There are some resources in the NEMO website that might help also.
Www.first.nemo.org
If you can't meet before kickoff, can you email? Or otherwise communicate? You can be explaining the time commitment by sending out a meeting schedule. If that scares some people away, then they may not have been helpful to the team anyway... I see it as being realistic in communicating expectations. Same for financial commitments.
I think one of your biggest priorities will be time management (project management). If you stay focused on meeting your deadlines, you will have to use the KISS principle this rookie year. Find out what those deadlines need to be and communicate them very visibly to the team.