By Stampeders.com staff

Kamau Peterson was an active CFL player as recently as 2011, but that doesn’t mean much to some of the people he runs into in his new vocation.

“Some of the younger kids don’t remember me as a player at all,” chuckled Peterson, an 11-year CFL veteran who is now director of athlete performance at the Playmaker U training facility east of Edmonton in Sherwood Park. “Their parents may remember me from my time in the CFL, but a lot of them know me better for what I’ve done after my playing career than what I did when I was a player.”

What the former Stamp has done is build a 25,000-square-foot facility to help train young athletes — not just in football, but also baseball, soccer, rugby and hockey — to take the next step in their development.

On the football side of things, Peterson and some of his former teammates including Aaron Fiacconi, Jed Roberts and Shannon Garrett, as well as a number of active CFLers, show the ropes to youngsters.

“It’s all about setting the stage and allowing the kids to accomplish their goals, whether it’s just getting on the field or trying to get a scholarship and playing at the next level,” said Peterson. “We develop the young athletes and allow them to tap into their potential.”

The idea started in 2007 when Peterson was a member of the Edmonton Eskimos and bloomed in 2011 with the construction of the training facility. A number of Playmaker U products will be on display next month in the North-South Senior Bowl at McMahon Stadium. The annual event is a showcase for graduating Grade 12 athletes.

“I won’t be able to make it this year but I’ll have players on both the North and the South, so I’ll have a vested interest in the game,” said Peterson.

The importance of development for Peterson stems from his own background as an athlete.

“I had one or two coaches who helped me and of course my family supported me,” he said, “but I didn’t have anything like this. I wish I had. I remember telling all my coaches that I wanted to earn a scholarship and nine out of 10 of them laughed at me.”

Peterson had the last laugh, though. Despite a limited football background — he didn’t take up the sport seriously until he was 17 — Peterson played U.S. college football at the University of New Hampshire and made his CFL debut with the Stampeders in 2001 at the age of 22.

He put up respectable stats in his freshman season — 37 catches for 465 yards — and helped the Stamps win a Grey Cup.

“That was an 8-10 team, if you remember,” said Peterson. “No one expected us to win but we stuck it out after a slow start and just kept getting better and better as the season rolled along.

“That was such a great team with a great group of guys — Alondra Johnson, Travis Moore, Marc Boerigter, Kelvin Anderson, Jackie Kellogg, Jamie Crysdale, Jay McNeil, Fred Childress, Thomas Rayam, Kelly Malveaux. They seem almost like mythical creatures now thinking about them but they helped me out so much that year.”

The one drawback of achieving the ultimate team goal at the start of your career is that it may create unreasonable expectations.

“I definitely fell into that category,” Peterson nodded. “I had never won a team championship before, only individual titles in track and field. When we won as an 8-10 team that first year, I thought it was only the beginning.

“Instead, it wasn’t until 2008 that I even got back into the playoffs.”

By then, Peterson had bounced around from Calgary to Winnipeg to Hamilton to Edmonton. He had some solid seasons along the way — including 62 catches for 931 yards and six touchdowns in 2002 with Calgary — but it was with the Eskimos in 2007 that he really put it all together.

Peterson put together back-to-back seasons of 1,000 receiving yards and was named the CFL’s Most Outstanding Canadian in 2008.

“A lot of people ask me that, why it took me until my seventh and eighth seasons to break out,” he said. “It was a number of things. It was partially opportunity and it was partly playing on some teams that weren’t very good in those early years.

“But mostly it was a case of my football IQ finally catching up with me. I started playing football when I was 17 and my background was in other sports — track, basketball, baseball. So even when I got to the CFL, my football knowledge was infantile. I was still dealing with all the jargon and trying to learn the game.”

There was an upside to having a limited football history, too.

“At that point of my career, I was still fresh and I wasn’t as beat up as other guys who had been playing football for longer. It was all good until I tore my Achilles tendon in 2010.”

Peterson did managed to get back on the field after the long recovery from that injury, but he played just two games with the Esks at the end of the 2010 season and six games with BC in 2011 before calling it a career.

He now draws from his experiences as a CFLer — both positive and negative — to help guide the young players who call on Playmaker U.

“Oh, I definitely do that,” said Peterson. “I’d be remiss if I didn’t. I learned a lot along the way and I try to share that with the kids and tell them about some of the potholes they might encounter and how to work though any adversity.”