For 16 seasons, Joe Casamento has led Christian Brothers Academy’s football program to heights both familiar and new, sending dozens of players into the college ranks.

Now, that task falls on someone else after the 67-year-old Casamento announced on Wednesday that he is leaving CBA to take a job at a private school in Washington, D.C.

Specifically, Casamento will be director at St. John’s Collegiate High School’s Entrepeneur, Innovation and Leadership Institute in the nation’s capital, but he’ll also still coach football as the program’s offensive coordinator.

During his remarkable tenure, the Brothers won 143 games and lost just 27, an average of nearly nine wins per season, and won eight Section III titles in three different classes, most recently a Class AA championship in 2013.

According to Casamento, he had no plans to leave CBA until, during a recent trip to the Washington, D.C. area, he was pulled toward a meeting in Baltimore with St. John’s alum Kevin Plank, who is the CEO of Under Armour. On Christmas Eve, Casamento said he decided to take the St. John’s job, which he starts later this month.

CBA was already a winning program when Casamento took over as head coach in 1999. He brought with him plenty of local coaching experience, too, from two stints at Henninger High School and another at Hamilton College.

And the winning would continue for the Brothers, only at a higher rate, as a string of Section III titles caused the program to get promoted from Class B, and then to Class A, and finally to the Class AA ranks in the first years of the new millennium.

But the impact Casamento made on the local high school game went beyond the victories. He instituted a spread offense that emphasized passing the ball in a way not seen before in Central New York, a concept that many other programs would later copy.

That led to record-setting totals for a string of CBA quarterbacks, from Casamento’s son, Joe Jr. (who would go to Villanova), to the Paulus brothers, most famously Greg, who directed the Brothers to its greatest gridiron accomplishment, the 2004 state Class AA championship. Greg Paulus went on to play basketball at Duke and is now an assistant basketball coach at Ohio State.

Numerous stars on both sides of the ball would make their way to play college football during those 16 years, with the most recent examples including John Phillips, who is going to Boston College.

In addition, former players and coaches who worked under Casamento have found success elsewhere, including Joe Sindoni, who led Skaneateles to the 2012 Section III Class C title and is now coaching at Cicero-North Syracuse. Sindoni’s top two assistants, Tim Brown and Tim Lee, played for Casamento at CBA in the early 2000s.