Six members of the Michigan football staff climbed out of a plane late Monday night on the largest of American Samoa's seven islands in the Pacific Ocean. The group had just completed the 20-hour trip from Detroit to Pago Pago and would soon begin a full day of learning about the territory’s culture.

On Wednesday, the coaches will host a camp for 430 high school football players on an island that has a total of seven high schools. They will leave the camp, drive directly to the airport and fly another 3,000 miles to the southeast corner of Australia for Round 2. Meanwhile, head coach Jim Harbaugh and another contingent will be starting their own hectic schedule on Wednesday morning in Indianapolis. Thus begins the unprecedented month of June for the Wolverine staff -- four weeks of leaving no recruiting stone unturned and spreading the gospel of football to every nook and cranny of the globe that will have them.

Michigan’s coaches will participate in more than 40 camps during a 29-day tour that will take them to 22 different states and begin and end on the other side of the world. To visit each stop in order (the staff is splitting up to cover all this ground) one would have to travel more than 17,119 miles in the continental U.S. That doesn’t include the bookend journeys to American Samoa, where Harbaugh will visit at the end of June to teach the game to a group of Pop Warner-aged players.

"There’s already talk on the island about him coming at the end of the month," said Lealao Melila Purcell, who helped organize the camps on Samoa. "The excitement is really at the end of June when coach Harbaugh will get here."

Five weeks ago, it wasn’t clear that Harbaugh and company would be going anywhere. In early April, the NCAA Division I Council voted to prohibit coaches from helping out at camps away from their own campuses. The ruling, spurred by unhappy coaches in the SEC and ACC, threatened to knock satellite camps out of orbit for good. When the Division I Board of Directors decided to table the motion for further discussion at the end of April, Michigan’s staff started filling up its calendar like the camps were going out of style. After all, they still might be.

Many of the camps on Michigan’s slate this month were already firmly set up when the NCAA decided to allow them a little more than a month ago. For example, discussions about the coaches’ June 5 trip to Old Dominion’s campus began last fall.

The Monarchs, who joined the FBS in 2014, hosted Penn State’s staff last summer for a camp that drew nearly 1,000 Virginia-area football hopefuls. Old Dominion head coach Bobby Wilder said he reached out to every school in the Big Ten this year to see who was interested in coming. Penn State, Maryland and Michigan all jumped on board.

Wilder said that during the month of April when the plans for a high school camp had to be put on hold, Harbaugh offered to bring his staff to campus anyway and hold a free camp for middle-school-aged players.

"The people that are taking shots at him, I don’t think they really understand how passionate this guy is about football and how much he loves it," Wilder said. "There’s a genuine-ness to him wanting to teach the game to whoever we can."

Many of Michigan’s camps weren’t fully formed -- or formed at all -- when the powers that be reversed course on satellite camps a month ago. That led to a frantic few weeks for the program’s support staff and compliance department.

Tony Tuioti, the Wolverines' new director of player personnel, first reached out to Purcell about doing a camp in Samoa during the last week of April. The process of finding a spot in Michigan’s busy schedule and laying out the logistics of the camp took about two weeks from start to finish. Tuioti said the biggest hurdle to clear was working with the compliance department to approve every poster and procedure associated with the camp.

"We wanted to make sure that when the camp goes off [Wednesday] that everything was within the rules of the NCAA," he said. "That process took us about a week of going back and forth to get all figured out."

A busy month of May will lead to an even busier month of June for Michigan’s coaches. What June leads to -- in terms of the prospects they gather and the future of these camps -- remains to be seen.