IS it possible to have delayed player spawning after server connection? (UNet)

I feel like this is a stupidly simple question, but ive searched for 2 days now and found nothing just to perform this simple task.

Overview of what I'm trying to do: I want both players to connect, select character and THEN SPAWN THE CHARACTERS. I do not want the player character to be spawned when the player connects. This seems extremely simple but due to everything beind inside a magic black box for server/client callbacks when players connect this just isn't happening.

Here's what I've tried so far:

   public override void OnServerConnect(NetworkConnection conn)
     {
         Debug.Log("Player " + iNumActivePlayers + " connected from " + conn.hostId);
         connections.Add(conn);
         base.OnServerConnect(conn);
     }

store the connections in a list of connections when someone connects. then when i click a button on the HOST I want all clients to spawn their own characters. and have them play out as if they spawned instantly on connection

Is the only way to do this by adding another game object to the scene, give it a new scripts that inherits networkbehaviour and have that call ClientScene.AddPlayer() ? via [Command] and [RpcClient] functions?

I feel like i'm not understanding something about this behavior or i'm not overriding functions properly.

Any help would be appreciated literally every single tutorial for this is barebones " spawn the player instantly when people connects" and every other question ive seen on this still is instant spawning.