— Last week isn’t the first time Conor Donovan traveled to Orlando to play soccer.

In November 2009, Donovan and his Fuquay-Varina Flash Red Under-14 club team entered the Disney Junior Soccer Showcase. Henry Gutierrez, their coach and a former All-American standout at NC State, didn’t expect much. His team’s player pool was much smaller than their nationally-ranked competitors. To make matters worse, Fuquay was slotted in same bracket as Solar Academy of Texas, one of the best youth clubs in the country.

Fuquay didn’t win any of their three games that weekend, but Gutierrez still remembers the first match against Solar, played the day after Thanksgiving.

“That day, Conor proved to us why he is where he is,” Gutierrez recalls. “In that 70-minute game, I believe he made more saves than our goalkeeper in blocking shots. It was amazing the number of balls he was able to block and clear and head off the goal line. The game ended up 0-0, when it really should have been a 7-0 or 8-0 game. So that day, against the best team in that tournament, you could see that this kid belongs at a different level.”

Donovan took his latest steps to a different level last month. First, he was a member of the United States U-20 Men’s National Team at the 2015 CONCACAF Championship in Jamaica, where the U.S. qualified for the FIFA U-20 World Cup in New Zealand this summer.

Then last week, two days after returning home to North Carolina, Donovan headed back to Orlando. On Jan. 8, Donovan’s 19th birthday, he signed a Generation adidas contract with Major League Soccer, foregoing the remainder of his college career at NC State. On Jan. 15, expansion side Orlando City SC selected the 6-foot-2-inch defender in the MLS SuperDraft.

Generation adidas (GA) is a joint venture between MLS and U.S. Soccer with the stated goal of developing domestic talent. In practice, it encourages early entry of top college underclassmen and other youth national team players. Players are chosen through an inexact selection process carried out by league officials in consult with various coaches and scouts across the country. The number of GA selectees has diminished in recent years – Donovan was one of only five members of the 2015 GA class and the only college freshman.

“It was always the plan when I went to college to try to get a GA contract after my first or second year,” Donovan told WRALSportsFan in a telephone interview last week. “I always wanted to go [to college] just one or two years and get in a pro environment as soon as possible because that’s the best thing for you to grow.”

Salaries for GA players typically skew higher than MLS contracts offered to college seniors and other newcomers. Two key components of Donovan’s contract are that it’s a three-year guaranteed deal and, like all GA contracts, includes additional funds for him to eventually obtain his college degree.

Donovan bucked a number of recent trends in deciding to jump to MLS after his freshman season at NC State. Some promising college underclassmen remain in school to maximize their playing time and eventual marketability. Each year, a few prospects forego MLS altogether to go overseas and ply their potential on ultra-competitive European pitches, with decidedly mixed results.

The difference is that unlike the diffuse U.S. player development system, the elite professional clubs in Europe and elsewhere in the footballing world regularly funnel promising youngsters as young as five and six years old into their developmental academies. There, they experience rigorous, regimented training in a professional environment at an early age.

Donovan admits that if he wasn’t offered a GA contract this year he considered going overseas to train over the summer and then return to NC State for his sophomore season. But the opportunity to dive into a full-time professional training environment at age 19 with the security of a three-year guaranteed contract was too much to pass up.

“For me, [MLS] was just the best place,” Donovan says. “You could go to Europe and the next you know you’re not playing at all, or you could be playing good and be gone. At the same time, MLS has a little more security but still tests you because there’s world class players. I don’t think MLS gets enough credit for that.”

Donovan used to keep exact count of the countries he’s visited to play soccer—he thinks the number is now 14 or 15. After all, a weekend tournament in Asheville once felt like a trek for a kid kicking balls around the Fuquay-Varina recreation league.

Donovan still remembers when someone first sparked the notion of a career playing soccer, long before international plane flights or clearing customs.

“When I was in 6th or 7th grade, my coach Dario Brose (a former NC State All-American, MLS All-Star and US National Team player) said he thought I had a real future [in soccer],” Donovan recalls. “I was talking to him about maybe playing baseball again just to have another sport. He brought up that I had a chance of doing something special with the talent that I had for soccer.”

Donovan eventually played four years for Gutierrez as a member of his NC Alliance club team, as well as varsity soccer as a freshman at Cardinal Gibbons High School in Raleigh. Along the way, Gutierrez and others began been mentioning Donovan to their friends and other connections inside the U.S. national team set-up in hopes of landing him a spot in the U.S. Under-17 Residency Program in Florida. With their help, Donovan secured a tryout at a regional training event in Greensboro.

“I’m pretty sure that’s where I got scouted—no one’s actually told me,” Donovan says. “Once I returned, I got called about a week later and invited to a tryout at the end of the summer with about 18 other guys. They had already chosen a lot of the guys [for Residency], but they chose five more from that camp, including me.”

Donovan describes the day he received the phone call inviting him to U-17 Residency as the “big defining moment” of his soccer life.

“That made me realize that I could do something even bigger than just going to play in college,” he said.

After two years in U-17 Residency, Donovan returned to North Carolina and joined the Capital Area RailHawks Academy team, coached by former U.S. youth national team defender John Bradford.

“Conor’s not the most athletic player we’ve ever had, and he’s not the most technically gifted player we’ve ever had,” Bradford explains. “But he’s at the highest level in terms of desire to compete and improve. He has a work ethic and work rate that’s rarely seen, and we haven’t seen guys like him very much.”

Through the Capital Area RailHawks program, Donovan also trained regularly with the RailHawks’ U-23 and pro teams. It was this exposure to the rigors of professional training that both accelerated Donovan’s development and convinced him of the need to transition into a pro environment.

“Being able to train with the first team [RailHawks] made this transition [to MLS] easier because I was aware of the high speed of play,” Donovan says.

Dewan Bader is director of coaching for the Triangle Futbal Club, head coach of the RailHawks U-23s and assistant coach for the RailHawks senior squad. He says the culmination of Donovan’s work with the RailHawks pro squad was a friendly last June against Puebla FC, one of Mexico’s most venerable pro clubs. Donovan not only started at center back for the RailHawks first team, but also netted a first-half goal.

“Two years ago Conor was good and a decent size kid,” Bader says. “But when you put him in against the pros, he would do a lot of things right but still couldn’t keep up with them. That’s the biggest difference in what everybody saw in the Puebla game, is that Conor kind of became a man.”

The moment was yet another touchstone in Donovan’s soccer maturation.

“When I played against Puebla with the RailHawks, it made me realize that I could do stuff, you know what I mean?,” Donovan says. “Having a good game against Puebla made me realize it could happen sooner rather than later when it comes to a professional contract.”

Donovan only appeared in two matches for the U-20 national team in Jamaica. However, Bader observes that while most of his youth national teammates there are already part of professional teams, Donovan’s development has mostly occurred at the amateur level.

Perhaps Donovan’s backers are partly intoxicated by the U.S. national team’s seemingly neverending search for the next great center back. Nevertheless, they contend Donovan’s untapped potential combined with his uniformly acknowledged dedication and soccer intellect are why he has the tools to achieve higher accolades.

“Look at all the players who are on the U.S. senior national team who weren’t on the U-20 national team,” Bader says. “There’s a number of players who worked themselves into it.

“The reality is now he’s going to be in an environment where he’s back playing with professionals every day, and professionals who, quite frankly, are better than the RailHawks on the whole,” Bader continues. “So if he’s going to be in that environment, that’s going to accelerate his improvement again like it did when he was here with the RailHawks. I think we could very well see Conor in five or six years being with the full national team.”

“Conor came back to our team after being at Residency to train with us, and they were going for a jog at Middle Creek Park,” Gutierrez remembers. “When they went on this run, the guy leading the pack was Conor Donovan. He didn’t have to lead the pack—he was a national team kid and could have sat back in the middle or the back. His work ethic is so grand compared to everybody else that he doesn’t want to sit in the middle of the pack … To me, that’s a different kid.”

Bader enjoyed similar experiences with Donovan during his training with the RailHawks.

“Conor would come in and train with the [RailHawks] first team, and we’d also have training at night with the U-23s,” Bader says. “I’d have to make him take a day off in the morning so he’s not doing two-a-days every day. He just wanted as much soccer as possible.”

It’s undecided where Donovan will find his soccer this year. As a 19-year-old, it’s unlikely he’ll receive a starting spot with Orlando City. He might remain with the MLS club all season for training, or he might be loaned out in order to play regular matches against pro competition, including at Louisville City FC, Orlando’s official lower division affiliate.

Nevertheless, Donovan hopes to compete for the U.S. in the U-20 World Cup this summer. And he makes no secret of his desire to one day play for the U.S. national team and compete in a FIFA World Cup.

Until then, he wants to have a successful stint in Orlando, just like that trip to Disney in 2009.

“I’m happy with Orlando and Orlando’s happy to have me, too.”