It's all fallen into place nicely for Conor Glass, but coming home from Australia was a bigger wrench for him than going there in the first place.
Upping sticks as an 18-year-old back in 2016 wasn’t necessarily a straightforward call, but the size of the opportunity meant that it was one that he was always likely to take, with Hawthorn keen on his services.
Having captained Derry minors in 2015, he signed for the AFL club on a category B contract before moving to Melbourne in July of the following year.
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“I wouldn’t say it was a hard decision,” he says. “Any young footballer wants to be professional. It’s a professional environment. And the life experiences you got out there, it was unbelievable.
“People travel to Australia just to experience a different way of life. Whereas I had that in a professional environment. It was an easy choice in the end. Thankfully I had the support of my family and my community as well.”
He made his AFL debut within a year and though his career hadn’t quite taken off as he might have hoped, he was up to 21 appearances when he decided to come home at the end of the 2020 season. He was still only 22 - younger than Oisin Mullin is now, the former Mayo star having recently broken into the Geelong team.
At the time, Derry were in Division Three, but they’ll be back in top flight next year and have won successive Ulster titles, while Glass picked up an All Star last year.
His club, Glen, had never even won a county title up to 2020 but they’ve won the last two and went all the way to the All-Ireland club final this year.
All of that was a long way from inevitable as he weighed up his options three years ago with the Covid-19 pandemic at its height.
“Coming home was a harder one than to leave. I had a lot of friends out there. I had to leave all that behind. Derry wasn’t necessarily in a great place when I came home either.
“So to say it was an easy choice – it definitely wasn’t. But I’ve landed on my feet the last couple of years.
“I have a partner. I’d put it down to my family and my partner, Niamh. Having interests outside of football and the business.
“It makes it easier. With Derry going well… because when Covid was still about, there were a few questions going around my head.”
Glass’s transition back to Gaelic football was as seamless as one could hope for, helped by the fact that he didn’t feel the need to adjust his body shape.
“A lot of the AFL boys don’t carry much weight. It’s all about conditioning, endurance… my body shape came from the AFL and then it’s working for me now so why change it?
“There’s a couple of big boys out there – Conor Grimes from Louth is an absolute machine – so it works for him but it won’t necessarily work for me, but you know your own body when you’re 25-years-old.”
And despite having been almost constantly on the go between club and county for the past couple of years, his body hasn’t succumbed to any significant injury.
“My parents would like to say it’s genetics!” he smiled.
“It’s luck and the high performance coaches that I’m working with. Peter Hughes, our S&C coach, I can’t speak highly enough of him.
“It’s the people around you but thankfully I was able to get into the elite environment from a young age, I was with Hawthorn since I was 16 and they put me through an injury prevention programme.
“I did it for three years before I went out and it was a good platform for me, it obviously played a part in it.”
Still though, he needs to jump off the treadmill every now and again, particularly in light of the fact that he returned to play for Derry in the opening round of the League this year just six days after Glen’s controversial All-Ireland club final loss to Kilmacud Crokes.
“I’m as fresh as ever to be honest. As weird as that sounds. The first couple of games in the League, I could probably have done with a break, but that was my way of dealing with the club final.
“But I’ve been managed well the last couple of months, I’ve been able to go to Tenerife a couple of times with my partner, just to recharge the batteries. If you’re so fixated with GAA and high performance, you can be quite overwhelmed. You have to have a balance with it as well.
“I’m in a good place at the right time of the season. I feel like the rest of the Derry squad is too.”
Derry have a shot at reaching successive All-Ireland semi-finals as they face Cork on Sunday, and Glass insists that they’re a better side now than the one that fell to Galway in the last four in 2022.
“We definitely are. I feel like we have that experience of last year behind us and things are falling into place for us as well.
“Ciaran McFaul is a serious athlete and we’ve seen over the last 10 years. He’s been a stalwart for Derry football before he left (for the USA) and he’s one of the top three footballers in Derry on his day.
“To have that sort of personnel coming into your team halfway through your season gives you an extra boost and it pushes the bench to get into the team. It drives a lot of factors which again makes the team better and makes us perform better on game day.”
An All-Ireland is essentially the only frontier left for Glass to conquer now, so much has he won since he came home, and he’s confident that it’s something that Derry’s incremental improvement will add up to.
“I hope so, aye,” he said.
“I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t believe it.
“That is the ultimate goal, we fell short last year but we feel that we have the personnel to do it.”
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