Maryland football coaches will appear at popular satellite camps, including one at Old Dominion

The Maryland football coaching staff will participate in a handful of offseason camps this spring and summer, opening up potential recruiting pipelines in areas around the country.

DJ Durkin and his staff will appear at at least "Sound Mind, Sound Body" camps, including the most famous one in Detroit, the camp announced this week. They'll also go camping at SMSB events in Atlanta, Washington and Tampa, as Durkin and his staff take advantage already of the NCAA's new-old allowance of satellite camps away from schools' campuses. All three camps are in June.

The Terps will also appear in Norfolk, Va., at a camp with Old Dominion on June 12, according to Dave Johnson of The Daily Press.  This kind of thing has become increasingly common in the past few years, with smaller teams like Old Dominion -- a Conference-USA squad that just made the jump from FCS -- inviting staffs from much bigger programs to camps at their universities.

It might sound counterintuitive to invite a better recruiting team onto your own campus, but it's actually smart business for ODU. The presence of Maryland (and also of Michigan and Penn State on different days) will draw a lot of top Virginia talent to the campus, but also plenty of players who are definitely good enough for ODU even if they're not good enough to be recruited by Durkin, Jim Harbaugh or James Franklin. And ODU can then make headway with those players.

Satellite camps are both good and bad for Maryland. The Terps would probably rather not have other major programs at an event in Washington, for instance, but they'll be really happy to get the chance to tap into the Florida recruiting scene a little bit more with a camp in Tampa. So things tend to even out.

Durkin also announced formal plans for a long-known series of summer camps in College Park, where Maryland will try to connect with primarily local prospects. The Terps will host a lineman camp, a specialist camp, a team seven-on-seven camp and four one-day technique camps, all in June.