PITTSFORD, N.Y. – In the middle of preparing for the biggest game in St. John Fisher football history – a matchup against Mount Union in the NCAA Division III Semifinals in 2006 – Blaise Faggiano had to drop everything.
Faggiano and his wife, Alison, received an urgent phone call earlier that week. They had been approved to adopt their son, James, and needed to get on a flight to Guatemala as soon as possible.
Without hesitation, then-Fisher head coach Paul Vosburgh, who wrote the Faggiano’s a letter of support during the adoption process, allowed his defensive coordinator to go on that spur-of-the-moment trip with his wife to bring their son home.
Faggiano, who prepared for Mount Union remotely during that blur of a week, arrived back from the journey less than 24 hours before the game. He dropped his wife and son off at their home in Webster, hopped in a rental car with a handful of other assistant coaches and made it to Alliance, Ohio, in time to get an hour of sleep and lead the team prayer, as he always did.
“It was such an amazing time in my life,” Faggiano said. “I became a father. We were getting ready to coach in our biggest game ever. And coach Vosburgh was there to support me and my wife through that absolute craziness of it all.”
Faggiano and so many others can talk glowingly about Vosburgh to no end. Vosburgh, often called Coach Vos for short, led the Cardinals for more than three decades — 34 years in all – and retired last November with no shortage of wins and accolades to be proud of. But far more importantly, he always put the people in his program first, a hallmark that made his career at Fisher just as much as the success.
“I wouldn’t be where I am today if it weren’t for Paul and my time at St. John Fisher,” Faggiano said. “He’s one of the most genuine human beings I have ever been around. He deeply cared about his players and his coaching staff.”
Vos Being Vos
Everyone seems to have a story of a time when Vosburgh pushed his personal interests aside or went out of his way to help them or someone else. Faggiano, now in his 18th year as Utica’s head coach, has too many to count.
Another one of his quintessential moments with his mentor came during the final game of Vosburgh’s coaching career last November at Growney Stadium. Days before the game, Utica running back James Salles suffered fatal injuries in an accident. Vosburgh organized a pregame moment of silence and a postgame prayer circle for the teams at midfield.
“He told me before the game, ‘We will do whatever you need,’” Faggiano said. “That was just (so emotional). It gets me choked up just thinking about it.”
For Ian Pace, now the offensive line coach and run game coordinator at Long Island University, his unforgettable Vosburgh tale came less than 24 hours after he arrived in the Rochester area.
Pace virtually connected with Vosburgh during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, when he was the offensive line coach at Centre College. They had multiple in-depth discussions about offensive schematics over Zoom, and Vosburgh eventually chose Pace as his associate head coach/offensive coordinator. Not very long after that, Pace and his wife, Sam, packed up their belongings and made the roughly 10-hour drive from Danville, Kentucky, to Penfield in the middle of winter. The next morning, they got a knock on their townhome door.
“Coach Vos was there,” Pace said. “Unannounced, unexpected. He was there to help us unload the rest of our stuff from the truck. That just shows you the type of man and coach he is. When he brings someone into his football family – or his family in general – he truly takes care of them. It just really speaks to who he truly is.”
Vosburgh’s passion for the people in his football family extends beyond that circle. He deeply cares about their families, their goals and all they have going on in their lives.
One of the best quarterbacks in Fisher history, Curt Fitzpatrick saw that as a player from 2000-04 and has appreciated it more and more over the years as he’s risen through the coaching ranks. He began his career under Vosburgh in 2006 as quarterbacks coach and climbed the ladder from there, becoming a head coach himself in 2013 at SUNY Morrisville before moving on to SUNY Cortland in 2020. He led the Red Dragons for five seasons, winning the Division III national championship in 2023, and moved up again in December 2024 when he became Division I (FCS) Colgate’s head coach.
“He always asks about my family,” Fitzpatrick said. “He asks about my brother, my mom and dad. As the years go by, it’s hard to remember some things – I can relate to that now as a head coach. You remember the people, but it’s hard to remember all of the details. But he does, even more than 20 years later. It just shows you how caring he is about people. It’s something I respect greatly about coach Vos. I try to emulate that as much as I can in the way that I coach and love my players.”
The High Points
It took some time for everything to come together for the program under Vosburgh, but the Cardinals stayed true to the tight-knit culture and relentless work ethic he instilled and became a consistent winner.
After winning just five games between 1999-2001, the Cardinals went 6-4 in 2002, 8-3 in 2003 and 10-2 in 2004, when they won the Empire 8 Conference and played in the NCAA DIII Football Championship for the first time in program history. Those three years commenced a stretch of 15 straight winning seasons, a run during which Fisher won six E8 titles and reached the NCAA Tournament five times. Fisher had five 10-plus-win seasons in that span.
“I just remember how happy we all were for him (Vosburgh) in 2004,” Fitzpatrick, who passed for 2,366 yards with 30 touchdowns that year, said. “We all wanted to do it for each other, but it was for him. To get that breakthrough for him and for him to get the credit he greatly deserved – I am sure it was a very proud moment for him.”
Faggiano, who spent nine seasons at Fisher, recalled the embrace he shared with Vosburgh after the Cardinals beat Alfred to clinch that first E8 title.
“I am Italian – I am a big hugger. Coach Vosburgh is not,” Faggiano said of the two-time E8 Coach of the Year and 2006 National Coach of the Year. “I will never forget him hugging me when we won the Empire 8. It was such a special feeling, accomplishing things for the first time.”
Rob Kramer also had a key role in the program’s prime years under Vosburgh, first as a star quarterback and later as a coach.
The Cardinals took down Springfield College and Rowan en route to the national semifinal in 2006, Kramer’s junior year. The following season, they dominated Hobart and Curry College to get back to the regional final. Kramer can still see the smile on Vosburgh had on his face after those triumphs.
“It was a culmination of his hard work,” Kramer, still in the top 10 in Fisher history in every major passing category, said. “To win those games was a testament to him and what he built.”
A member of Vosburgh’s coaching staff for 13 years, including as offensive coordinator from 2012-20, Kramer also recalled memories from the Cardinals’ 2013 NCAA run, which included upset wins over No. 9 John Carroll and an unbeaten Hobart team.
Nobody gave the Cardinals much of a shot that year.
“Before the John Carroll game, their sports information director and some administrators were asking our sports information director about where they should stay and go out to eat in Geneva,” Kramer said.
For much of the first half, John Carroll appeared ticketed for the Finger Lakes, leading 13-0 late in the second quarter. But Vosburgh’s resilient Cardinals rallied, outscoring the Blue Streaks 18-3 the rest of the way in a snowstorm en route to a 25-16 victory. The Cardinals made the 32-mile trip to Hobart the following Saturday and thumped the Statesmen 27-6 to advance to their fourth regional championship under Vosburgh.
Those victories, Kramer said, included all of the trademarks Vosburgh’s teams prided themselves on – winning the turnover battle, minimizing penalties and sound special teams play.
“We just kept swinging – that was our mindset,” Kramer said. “We stayed true to what we did well, and I think that embodies coach Vosburgh as a genuine, whole person. There are always peaks and valleys in games and in life. You have to have that even keel.”
‘He Inspired Me To Do It The Right Way’
Faggiano and Fitzpatrick both have the same image of Vosburgh embedded in their minds when they think of him as a coach. It includes Vosburgh getting a full-blown workout in on a stair stepper while dissecting film on one of those vintage televisions connected to a video cassette recorder.
“He’d have his cowboy remote,” Fitzpatrick said. “He would be leaning on the stair stepper and going, going, going while watching film.”
As humorous as that is to think about now, it illustrates how much Vosburgh cared and embraced the true grind of being a college football coach, which no doubt inspired those he empowered to work under him.
“When you’re a player, you don’t realize how hard the coaches work. You know they work hard, but you don’t know everything that goes into it and the time that it takes,” Fitzpatrick said. “Working for him and seeing how selfless he was and how much time he put into it – he gave me an opportunity to get into coaching and inspired me to do it the right way.”
Kramer followed Fitzpatrick as quarterbacks coach, holding that role for four seasons before becoming the Cardinals’ offensive coordinator. More than anything else, Kramer admired how Vosburgh always put the student-athletes first. Everything he did had a purpose for them, on and off the field.
“The biggest thing for him was providing an opportunity for student-athletes to be the best versions of themselves,” he said. “The relationship building and the concern for every student-athlete is a pretty remarkable trait. The most common thing you will hear about coach Vosburgh is how genuine he is. The wins and losses are what they are, but the impact he made on people is incredible.”
And that never changed about Vosburgh, even as college football did.
“The way football is going now, you can get lost in wanting to attain a certain stature or making a certain amount of money,” Pace said. “But he always reinforced the concept of it all being about the student-athletes and doing what is right for them.
“If you take care of people, the game of football will take care of you.”
There’s no better way than that to describe Vosburgh’s coaching career.
“It was all about the relationships,” Faggiano said. “He just has such a great way about him.”
