For a 15-year-old boy who just wanted to get his foot on a soccer ball, it was a long trek in the car from Redlands to the eastern reaches of Chula Vista.

Landon Donovan remembers it as a time before there was the toll road that knifed through South County. There were the seemingly interminable number of stoplights between Interstate 805 and what is now known as the Chula Vista Elite Athlete Training Center.

Once that kid was on the pristine fields of the facility, though, the wait seemed worth it.

“I remember one of my first games here,” Donovan recalled on a recent morning, standing not far from where he got his first view of the place. “We played against England’s under-17 national team, and the score was 4-3. I scored three goals, and Joe Cole scored four. I thought, ‘Damn, this guy is good.’ He ended up going on to play (56 times) for the English national team.


“That’s one of my first special memories here.”

Donovan, who estimates he visited the training center on more than 50 occasions in his playing career, has found himself at the crossroads of nostalgia and future-making over the last several weeks in Chula Vista.

In January, as the executive vice president and head coach of the expansion San Diego Loyal of USL Championship, the former U.S. national team and MLS star convened his first training camp. The transplanted San Diegan of several years has been working to build a squad that opens a 34-game regular-season schedule on March 7 at USD’s Torero Stadium.

It has been a process and challenge to which the 37-year-old has been fully committed, from scouring the country and world for top prospects, to instituting his coaching and life philosophies, to hauling big bags of sweaty post-practice jerseys to the laundry.


“The beauty of building a new team is that you get to do it from scratch,” Donovan said. “But that’s the challenge in it, too.”

He has thus far composed a side that will have a decidedly international flavor, with a good portion of roster hailing from outside of the U.S., and more specifically, from Caribbean or African nations.

For an exhibition on Sunday at the training center against backups from FC Dallas of MLS (San Diego “won” 1-0), those among the 23 Loyal who earned numbers to go on the back of their jerseys came from Jamaica, Granada, England, Cameroon, Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Panama, Montenegro and Mauritius.

Many of the Loyal have logged playing time in the USL — the designated second division of U.S. pro soccer — while a few have had brief or longer stints in Europe, Mexico and MLS.


The dean of them all is San Diego native and Patrick Henry High alum Sal Zizzo, a defender who has more than 160 MLS appearances.

Zizzo, 32, had retired and was engaged in real estate sales when Donovan reached out to him to be among the local faces of the new franchise. Another is midfielder Eric Avila, a 32-year-old Carlsbad native who also has MLS experience.

“It’s been really good. The guys that we’ve had in camp, it doesn’t feel like the USL level,” Zizzo said. “I’m used to playing at the MLS level, and the training, the speed of play, the work rate, everything has been up to that par.”

Said Avila, “I think (Donovan) has done a really good job of picking a style and team he wants to build in the first year.”


Of course, he had the good fortune of recruiting to San Diego. As soon as the club’s existence was announced for USL, players and agents lit up Donovan’s phone. He said he likely looked at 700 players in person or on film to get to the couple dozen he has now.

“Fortunately, there was a big list of very good players who were free agents in the league,” Donovan said. “We went after a number of them, and that’s maybe 60 percent of our roster. The rest are guys we identified through agents or watching tape.

“So far, the early signs are that everybody has been at least what I expected. And a number of them are above that.”

Donovan said the team has been built on four key tenets:


Competition: “We have to be competitive in this market. We don’t have a choice.”

Respect: “That’s big for me. It’s easier to be disrespectful than to be respectful. You actually have to harvest that all of the time. You have to point it out when it happens, and quickly, quickly call people out for being disrespectful. We just don’t stand for it.”

Gratitude: “If you’re here, and you’re not grateful for that, you can get out of here. There are a lot of people who would cut their finger off to be here.”

Compassion: “It’s something that I have developed in my life based on a number of circumstances. Especially on a team that has so many players from different parts of the world and different walks, (it’s) having the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes.”


Donovan cited the example of an African player who angered some teammates early in camp with his aggressive, sometimes reckless play. The coach made it a point to relate to the team that the player was within days of losing his working visa last season and was competing to “keep his dream alive.”

“You might not like his tackling,” Donovan said, “but now you understand him.”

Donovan hasn’t fully committed yet to the style his team will play, though there were some hints on Sunday when the Loyal used a 3-5-2 formation that requires extensive skills by the midfielders to take and hold possession.

In this fickle sports market, Donovan knows attractive — and winning — play would go a long way toward earning new fans.


“It’s a ‘prove it’ market,” he said. “People still aren’t aware of who we are yet. We haven’t done a marketing campaign. We will.

“Once they get out to Torero Stadium and see the product, they will be blown away,” he said. “But I can say that all I want. People aren’t going to believe it until we prove it.”