Grace Vesneske is standing outside Highmark Stadium, asking strangers to share their stories.
“Do you want to record your memories of Highmark Stadium?” she asks, motioning groups of jersey-wearing, Zubaz-fitted fans toward the Highmark TaleGate Trailer.
Vesneske is wearing a T-shirt that appears to be Bills blue, but look closer and you’ll see the logo for her events company, Twenty6 Productions, which was hired by Highmark Blue Cross Blue Shield to help operate this pregame promotion. Highmark, which has the naming rights for the Bills’ current home, and the new stadium that will open across the street in 2026, has been collecting fan memory videos. They have nearly 1,000 now, recorded over last season and this one through the Bills app and in this trailer.
The TaleGate stories tend to veer into why, and how, these fans love their Bills. A woman talking about sneaking her mother out of a nursing home, where she was recovering from a stroke, to go to the game. A man sharing his excitement, in American Sign Language, over attending Bills games over the last nine years and meeting quarterback Josh Allen. A daughter reminiscing about attending her first Bills game in frigid weather with her father, who died a couple years later.
It’s sweet. It’s emotional. It’s not necessarily the type of thing fans are planning to do as they walk toward the stadium and queue up for the security line, but Vesneske will unhesitatingly ask them to do it.
Navigating crowds of personalities? Connecting, even for a split moment, with people she doesn’t know?
These things are comfortable for her.
Doing it here, at this suburban stadium? This is comfortable ground for her, too. She grew up in Hamburg, only minutes away from the stadium, and she’s been honing those skills around this place for most of her life.
I know that, because I know her. Years back – during the ‘90s-era Super Bowl-bound Bills – we were kids in the same church. As a teen, I became one of her junior leaders in youth group. We stayed in touch over the decades; we worked together, we know each other’s families. Ours is one of those lifelong relationships that make it easy to catch up, even quickly, anytime. So on this Thursday night outside the stadium, about an hour before kickoff against the Miami Dolphins, I stop by the TaleGate Trailer to say hi.
“Do you want to record a memory?” Vesneske asks.
“I don’t have a lot of memories here, outside of sitting in the press box,” I say to Vesneske, who looks at me incredulously.
“You have one with me,” she says. “Doug Flutie.”
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She’s right. Sometime in the late 1990s, I was a cub sports writer and working for a publication that wanted junior reporters to interview athletes. Vesneske was one of the kids from the youth group I had interview Flutie, the former Bills quarterback. She met Flutie in the Bills’ field house, sat with him at the edge of the indoor practice field, and chatted for around 15 minutes.
“Coming here and meeting him was a really big deal for me,” she says.
“Then let’s do this recording together,” I say.
She agrees, and we step inside one of the two TaleGate trailers. The interior is decorated with Bills memorabilia – an Andre Reed jersey, a Marv Levy-autographed football – with Buffalo phrases like “Do you Billieve?” and “Kick my heels up and shout” covering a wall. We sat in a pair of stadium seats, locked eyes with a tiny camera, and began.
“My favorite Bills memory has to do with Grace,” I say, giving a little background. These videos can be shared on social media, and are destined for an eventual digital tribute book, “Homage to Highmark Stadium.”
I find myself slipping comfortably into broadcast journalist mode. “What did we come here to do, Grace?” I say, turning to her.
“Interview Doug Flutie,” she says. “It was the best.”
Until that day, she had never visited the stadium or the field house in Orchard Park. The stadium was more a backdrop to her everyday life, a place she passed on the way to a store or a movie, and like most locals, a place her parents likely avoided driving near on a traffic-jammed game day.
The short interaction with Flutie – and the chance to see the Bills’ barnlike practice facility – made the place feel more special. More like what it is to the tens of thousands of fans who don’t see it on a daily basis.
“I felt more in touch with the local Bills fan base than I ever had been before,” she says into the camera. And then she takes it deeper, pointing out that in her 20s, she tended bar at O’Neill’s Stadium Inn, a neighborhood bar across from the stadium, and she worked as a driver for a charity event, helping her meet Bills luminaries like Levy and Bruce Smith, both Pro Football Hall of Famers.
She’s realizing, in the moment, how pivotal this place – this extended neighborhood of Highmark Stadium – has been to her career. Meeting Flutie helped her appreciate the specialness of the Bills. Running the bar at O’Neill’s revealed her ability to serve a crowd, work at a fast place and handle pressure with confidence. Driving VIPs reinforced her ability to relate to all kinds of people. “I could call Bruce on the phone and he will remember me,” she says.
Every bit of her time spent in and around this place plays out today as she works here. Twenty6 Productions, which Vesneske founded with her business partner Josh Holtzman, helps produce an interactive marketing program for M&T Bank outside the stadium on game days, along with the Highmark TaleGate program, which will return on Nov. 2 before the Bills-Kansas City Chiefs game.
She’s thinking about those things as she says, “Thanks to the time (around) the Bills, I learned a lot.”
As we exit the trailer, I turn to her and say, “That was pretty full circle.”
“Yeah,” she says. “That Doug Flutie experience really started it all. That was a big deal.”
But the big deal wasn’t just Flutie. It was the place, the team, the atmosphere. It was a kid discovering that this massive stadium, which is part of a neighborhood that’s quiet all but a dozen days a year, means something more – for her, every day of the year.
Follow Tim O’Shei on Twitter @timoshei .
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Tim O’Shei
Enterprise Reporter
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