The Wolverine: Covering University of Michigan Football and Sports
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stop regardless of the amount of sleep he had been getting or how much coaching he had been doing. The travel schedule was brutal, often including multiples stops in one day, but Har- baugh was always loud, engaging and in command. He admitted that maybe they overdid it — but that thought wasn't with him for very long. "There have been a couple times al- ready where I thought, 'Maybe the crit- ics were right. Maybe this is too much,'" Harbaugh said early in the month. "But once you get here and once you see the football faces, and you see the hearts that the players and other coaches have for football, you ask yourself, 'Where else could I possibly want to be and where else should I be?' "Being right here with these young- sters is where we should be." His level of involvement varied depending on the venue. At Trinity Christian High School in Jacksonville, Fla., Harbaugh was clearly the alpha dog and ran the show from start to finish. He was barking out orders, di- recting traffic and even demonstrating techniques to the 100 or so campers. Former Michigan defensive coordina- tor and current Maryland head coach D.J. Durkin and some of his staff were also in attendance, but they let Har- baugh do his thing. The next day, in Tampa on the campus of the University of South Florida, Harbaugh was more of a cog in a bigger machine. With upwards of 600 campers, more coaches were needed because of the volume. The USF coaches were clearly the hosts, and even though Harbaugh's good friend and Bulls head coach Willie Tag- gart spoke a lot and had a huge role, it still felt like Harbaugh's gig. A lot of the drills were run by Harbaugh, but he wasn't quite the puppeteer that he was at some of the smaller camps. Regardless of the location, itinerary of each camp or attending staffs, Har- baugh was the one in the news and getting the headlines. Alabama head coach Nick Saban swore up and down about his anti-satellite camp stance, but before June was through, members of his staff were in attendance to see just what Harbaugh was up to. Other programs all around the coun- H a r b a u g h s o m e t i m e s m a d e m u l t i p l e camp stops per day, but once the camp- ers showed up his attitude was always the same: "Being right here with these young- sters is where we should be." PHOTO BY BRANDON BROWN