Tom Post need not walk far to get to work. A carpenter, Post does much of his woodworking in the shop next to his home in Canandaigua, N.Y. — a home he built and furnished with many of his own creations, of course.

Resourceful, creative and just plain smart, Post can take a block of wood, visualize the end result and make something tangible. He can probably make it better than any mass production line, too.

“Growing up, it was always, ‘Dad, I want this. Dad, I want this.’ And he’d always go make it,” said his son, Joe Post, a graduate student at St. John Fisher.

When it came time for his son to play lacrosse, that ingenuity was put to good use. About 12 years ago, Tom Post began to make wooden shafts after his son requested a homemade stick.

First, they were oak. Too brittle. Then laminate. Light, but not strong enough. Finally, Tom Post crafted his son’s shafts out of hickory. Tough. Sturdy. Just right.

Kind of like his son. Joe Post, a self-proclaimed “simple man” and one of the biggest grinders Canandaigua High School coach Deven York has ever seen, put those sticks to work. In the past week, Post has set the all-time Division III records in ground balls and faceoffs won. Each of the 1,193 faceoff wins he’s amassed has come with a hickory shaft. Every single one.

PHOTO COURTESY OF TOM POST

“It’s one of those things that I’ve been using it for so long now that I like it and I don’t want to switch,” said Joe Post, who will be an integral piece in St. John Fisher’s Empire 8 championship game matchup against Nazareth on Saturday at 5 p.m.

“When he got to high school, I felt like he was using them to make me happy,” Tom Post said. “He goes, ‘I like this better.’ He swears it gets you a better grip than anything you can buy.”

Indeed, Joe Post loves the grip. Playing in New York, where most of the season feels more like winter than spring, means modern shafts can get cold. Not his. And, no, he said, they don’t break nearly as often as you might think.

He last asked his father for a new batch two years ago. Tom Post made a dozen. There hasn’t been a need for any more.

“I think about it now, and I will think about it in the future,” he said. “It just adds a little extra value knowing that it’s something my father created. I’m a pretty lucky guy.”

Joe Post uses the word “luck” as if he didn’t earn his place atop the Division III record book. He immediately passes credit onto the guys on the wings, who’ve helped St. John Fisher dominate possession and earn the No. 7 ranking in the latest Nike/USA Lacrosse Division III Men’s Top 20.

He also uses it to describe his somewhat circuitous path to college lacrosse. By his own estimation, lacrosse was his third-best sport in high school. He also played hockey, basketball and football and spent the first semester of his freshman year on the football team at Hobart.

But he transferred after that first semester and found his new home at St. John Fisher, the first place he visited for lacrosse.

“If you would’ve told me six years ago that I’d be playing college lacrosse, I’d have laughed,” he said.

PHOTO COURTESY OF TOM POST

From football to lacrosse to the top of the faceoff chart, Joe Post humbly deflects praise. He never thought he’d set records, let alone take a single faceoff in college.

“You’re not going to meet a tougher kid or a humbler kid,” York said. “If you said his job was to score goals, he’d try to score goals. That work ethic and that humility, he just takes pride in doing his job. No task is too small for Joe Post.”

Don’t confuse his humility for a lack of competitiveness, though. His mother, Pam, is a “hell of an athlete,” according to his father. His older brother, Charlie, used to toughen him up playing hockey. Tom Post was an athlete, too, but he never played lacrosse. And making sticks wasn’t in his wheelhouse until his son made that request.

He just bought the machine required to do the job, and the rest is — quite literally — history.