You raise a good point. It goes without saying that players should be able to set themselves on "busy" so that they receive no chats or msgs if they choose. That was always a huge shortcoming of tournaments on COH1... players getting spammed by random idiots and not being able to do anything about it.
The awesome new ticker (coded by Inverse and yours truly) is already set to change to various stages, including check-ins open, check-ins close, day 1 tourney starts, and day 2 tourney starts.