Jack Carty's fondness for the oval ball did not go unnoticed by his Roscommon minor team-mates and Niall Kilroy remembers a bit of slagging, all good-natured, of course.
Back in 2009, 17-year-old Jack Carty, who will start at out-half for Ireland against Japan tomorrow morning, was in the Connacht Academy and based in Galway as his rugby career began to take shape.
But the Athlone native was also a highly-valued member of the Roscommon minor team that had their targets set on a provincial title.
"He was a man in demand," Kilroy, a member of the current senior team, tells RTÉ Sport.
"He was being pulled in different directions by different coaches.
"We were trying to get him down more but he was training with the rugby team. He’d come down at weekends to us and even try to make it down some evenings when he was in camp.
"We knew we had a decent team that was going somewhere so there would be a bit of slagging about him coming and going and spending more time with the rugby.
"But it was all respectful because we knew in the back of his mind he was thinking about going professional and taking the next step.
"We got to the Connacht final but he was more focused on rugby after that. That was when he had to make a decision.
"He was a very talented guy and there was always someone looking for him but he never let us down."
Carty, who is in line for just his ninth cap and second start, was named ahead of Joey Carbery, for tomorrow’s Pool A clash, for which Ireland are heavy favourites.
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It’s been a meteoric rise for the Buccaneers man, who only made his international debut in this season’s Six Nations game against Italy.
Prior to his Roscommon minor days his life could have gone in a completely different direction.
Carty represented the Republic of Ireland U15s in 2007 when he travelled to Qatar for a three-game tournament.
Tomorrow will be a special day for the Carty family.
— Connacht Rugby (@connachtrugby) September 27, 2019
Jack starts his first World Cup game in Japan, his brother Luke is at no.10 for the Eagles in Cardiff, while up the road in Llanelli their dad Ted attends his first PRO14 game as President of Connacht Rugby.#RugbyFamily pic.twitter.com/F3mwpToLLo
"I remember he was a decent player and a very nice young lad," then-Ireland boss Vinny Butler tells RTÉ Sport.
"He was a good footballer, I knew he was a good athlete and that he was involved in other sports but at that particular time he was concentrating on the football.
"You could see his focus and interest in what he was doing."
Butler had been involved with Irish underage teams in the 1970s and was back in charge when Carty popped up on the radar.
At that point Irish underage teams relied heavily on Dublin-based players but Butler organised country-wide trials for the regions.
"A lot of people from down the country were like, 'this is the first time anyone has come down to look at us’," he recalls.
"We’d bring the best 60 or so from those trials up to Dublin for three Sundays in a row and that’s where he turned up and impressed us. That was it, he was good, he stood out and he got selected."
Carty, who counted Jeff Hendrick, Matt Doherty and Robbie Brady among his team-mates, was offered a trial at Southampton but it never materialised and then found rugby and Gaelic football taking up his time.
"He started to concentrate on rugby then because he was doing well," adds Butler, director of footballer affairs at Belvedere FC.
"He probably would have had to move to Dublin to develop and play a higher grade of soccer and to develop himself if he was aspiring to go to England or play in older international teams.
"He probably felt he was better at rugby than he might have been at soccer and was getting on local representative teams down there."
And so rugby won out and a series of impressive performances last season caught the attention of Joe Schmidt and he now faces the biggest game of his life. It’s been a long and winding road.
"We knew he had the mindset that he was going to make if he got the breaks and thankfully he did," adds Kilroy.
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