PITTSBURGH — Having grown up in Butler, Donovan Slater made a tough decision before his freshman year in high school.

“I’m a Christian and I wanted to go to a Christian school,” Slater said.

He visited North Catholic — prior to that school’s move to Cranberry Township — before deciding to attend Central Catholic.

“I knew North Catholic was coming to Cranberry and it would have been closer, but I liked everything about Central,” Slater said. “It’s a longer drive and everything, but it felt like the right fit.”

It was.

Now a senior at Central, Slater is carrying a 4.3 grade point average At 6-foot-3, 285 pounds, he is in his third year as a starter on the Vikings’ offensive line. He is going to continue his academic and football career at Yale next year.

Slater started at right tackle as a sophomore before moving to center his junior year. He is playing center again this year.

“I talked about the position change with my coaches after my sophomore season,” Slater said. “I was thinking about my future in football and not many tackles in college are 6-3. They are a few inches taller than that.

“The coaches agreed I’d be better off at center and everything has worked out.”

So far this season, the Vikings are 3-1 — winning their last three games by scores of 48-7 over Shaler, 55-14 over North Allegheny and 55-6 over Hempfield — while averaging more than 320 yards per game.

Central’s entire starting offensive line is back from last year’s WPIAL and PIAA Class AAAA state championship team.

“We don’t feel any additional pride in how many yards our offense is gaining,” Slater said. “We don’t care about the statistics. All we care about is winning games.”

The Vikings have been doing plenty of that. Since Slater became a starter in 2014, Central has won 29 of 33 games. It has reached the WPIAL finals twice and won the title once.

“All we want to do is get back to Hershey,” Slater said.

If they do, he will be a big reason why.

“Donovan calls all our line signals up front,” Central coach Terry Totten said. “He’s a very intelligent player in addition to his physical skills.

“We’ve watched him grow and mature as a center over the past two years. He never stops working at it.”

Slater commutes an hour to school each day, carpooling with junior teammate Cam Laconi, also a Butler resident. Laconi is a defensive back who has an interception and two long punt returns this season.

“Cam will drive one week, I’ll drive the next,” Slater said. “It all works out.”

Slater grew up in Meridian and played junior high football for Butler.

“It was a very hard decision,” he said. “It’s tough suddenly not playing football with the guys you have been with all your life.

“It was just the right decision for me. The guys I play with at Central, we’re like brothers. We spend so much time together all year. We really drew close to each other.”

Totten said Slater is athletic enough at center that he makes plays downfield.

“He can get out, go straight ahead and cut down a linebacker,” the coach said. “He can get downfield and make blocks on screens.

“I have no doubt he’ll be successful at Yale. He’s an academic leader and he’s got the drive to get on the field and help that team.”

Slater isn’t sure what his role will be at Yale, which is coming off winning seasons of 6-4 last year and 8-2 in 2015.

“Whatever the coaches want, I’ll do,” he said. “I drew interest from other Ivy League schools ... Harvard, Columbia, Brown ... but just like Central, when I visited Yale, the fit was there.

“I’m just working on improving my craft. You can always perfect the things you do on the field, whether it’s getting lower leverage, running faster or reading things better.”

When Central plays Butler, Slater admits he thinks about the guys on the other side of the line of scrimmage.

“I’m a Butler guy. I have friends there,” he said. “There were never any hard feelings. At the end of the day, I had to do what was best for me.”