Kingston-area football fans may not have seen the last of former Canadian Football League player Rob Bagg.

If he has his way, they may see the freshly retired receiver walking the sidelines of a high school football field, guiding young players in the same way he says his former Frontenac Falcons coaches were there for him during his formative years.

“Frontenac is obviously a main attraction for me, having gained so many valuable lessons that really have carried through my entire career,” he said.

“I owe a lot to the teachers and coaches of Frontenac football: Mike Doyle, Doug Johnston and Wayne Tindale. Those guys have really shaped my foundation — as I’d like to refer to it as my work ethic and dedication — and that is from the mentorship that I gained from being a Frontenac Falcon.”

After a stellar 11-year CFL career that saw him win one Grey Cup in two appearances with the Saskatchewan Roughriders and become a West Division all-star, Bagg, 34, announced his retirement via Twitter on Sept. 17.

He and his family are living in the Limestone City, where he is, if you will, trading yardage for square footage while pursuing a career in real estate, and where he gets to watch his three young children grow up at home, close to family and old friends.

Bagg, who played his university football with the Queen’s Golden Gaels, accumulated 4,705 yards on 364 catches and scored 24 touchdowns in 143 CFL games as a wide receiver for the Roughriders.

“When you’ve loved something as much as I have loved the game of football, having your time run out as a player is a difficult thing to accept,” he said on Twitter.

Bagg said he wanted to play at least one more season on one of the three Ontario-based CFL teams — Toronto, Hamilton or Ottawa — so he could be closer to his Kingston home, but no offers materialized this season.

“That was a big reason we came back to Kingston,” Bagg said of his retirement.

Bagg said that coaching in the CFL was an option, but that would have taken him away from his growing family. He’s put that thought on the back burner.

“With three young kids, as you can imagine, the prospect of moving province to province, year by year now isn’t that appealing,” he said.

Bagg added, however, that he would have loved to have been part of the Queen’s football coaching staff this season, but the university did not show interest in him when he approached it last fall when it was searching for a new head coach.

“Unfortunately, I couldn’t even get a call back,” he said.

On the home front, Bagg and his wife, Kelly, have twins Thomas and Ella as well as five-year-old Leo, who are enrolled in elementary school in Kingston’s west end.

He looks forward to watching his own children play sports.

“To now be a part of their exploration as they get into sports and community activities, to be around that now has definitely been energizing for sure and definitely fun watching them learn and grow,” Bagg said.

“For now, it’s the right time to come home and re-establish myself here in this community,” he added.

With that in mind, Bagg has joined another team, which includes Mike Giffin, who is a former minor hockey and Golden Gaels football teammate and an ex-CFL opponent, and Korinne Peachy at Royal Lepage Pro Alliance.

“They’re great people to mentor me and I’ve been learning a lot every day from those two,” said Bagg, whose Roughriders lost the 2009 Grey Cup final to Giffin’s Montreal Alouettes.

Bagg, who was a Grey Cup winner in 2013 and a West Division all-star in 2014, called his CFL career an amazing experience.

“There’s lots of things I’ll take away from it, but certainly the friendships and all the guys I got to meet over the last decade, it was a great experience,” he said.

After four years of a successful university career with Queen’s, Bagg was eligible to be drafted in 2007 but was passed over. Saskatchewan showed interest in him and brought him to training camp, but Bagg chose to return to Queen’s for a fifth and final year of eligibility before sticking with the Roughriders from 2008 to his retirement.

Bagg proved durable early in his career, playing 60 consecutive games without injury, but he missed 37 games — starting at the end of the 2010 season, all of 2011 and a portion of 2012 — with three anterior cruciate ligament knee injuries. After his recovery, he played full seasons between 2013 and 2017.

He was released by Saskatchewan at the end of the 2018 training camp but came back late in the season to play two games for the Roughriders.

“If you play as long as I did, you get banged up and, all things considered, I was pretty fortunate,” he said. “To be able to stay on the same team for as long as I did and play along with guys that were kind of in the league with me for seven, eight or nine years, it was a great time to be a Rider.”

Bagg said Roughriders supporters were the best football fans in the country.

“As far as game-day experience goes, it would rival a lot of NFL games for sure,” Bagg said.

He said that even on the road, hundreds if not thousands of green-and-white-clad Roughrider fans would show up to cheer on the team.

His career highlight was winning the Grey Cup in 2013, at home in Regina.

“To hoist the Grey Cup in such an amazing atmosphere right at Mosaic Stadium doesn’t get much better than that,” he said.

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