D’Agostino comes full circle as St. Mary’s boys soccer coach

Mike D’Agostino is coming home ? and home, to him, is a school with a Spartan helmet as a logo.After spending the previous eight years coaching boys soccer at Salem High, D’Agostino, the alliterative lifelong Lynner, accepted the challenge of taking over for the retiring Al Jackson at St. Mary’s this past February. And he’s keenly aware of all that coaching boys soccer at the school entails.”There’s a legacy there,” says D’Agostino, 30, the oldest of three multi-sport brothers who went through St. Mary’s. “Al was there for many years, and he coached me for all four years I was here.”I learned a lot from him,” said D’Agostino, “and now, I just want to build up the program even more, and keep the tradition going strong. I’m really honored to have this opportunity.”As D’Agostino prepares for his first preseason camp, he is working toward putting a program in place. In his eyes, defense comes first.”I like to build from the back on out,” he said. “The offense will come if you have a strong defense.”He also wants to build on the program itself – which, he says, Jackson poured a lot of energy into creating.”I want to keep the same family atmosphere we had under him,” D’Agostino said. “So in that sense, there really isn’t much to change, actually.”True to his word, one of the first things D’Agostino did was hire Terrence McGaughey – who played in the same era as he did – as his assistant.”He was a great forward and midfielder,” said D’Agostino, figuring that his experience on the back end will mesh with McGaughey’s up front.D’Agostino can truly say that everything he’s become he owes to St. Mary’s – good and bad. He says he grew to love the family atmosphere at the school, helped immeasurably by the fact that there were only 52 seniors in his graduating class. Even as far back as then, though, he knew what he wanted to do.”In our yearbook,” he says, “if you look at my picture, it says that I wanted to play for the Revolution and coach at St. Mary’s. Well, I got to do one of those things, anyway.”He also found his life’s calling, indirectly, while playing soccer for St. Mary’s. In his first game as a senior, against Lynn English, he tore his anterior cruciate ligament.”I only played five games,” he said. “I had scholarships all lined up, but once you tear your ACL, they don’t want you anymore.”He settled on UMass-Boston, where he recovered sufficiently enough to play four years and set the school record for most games played. But even bigger, it was through his experiences that he became a physical therapist (he works in Thomas Cookson’s office in Peabody).”That knee injury at St. Mary’s affected my whole life,” he said. “It just changed the atmosphere of what I wanted to do with my life. It pointed me in the direction of rehab, and helping the elderly, and helping my coaching career.”One thing I want to do at St. Mary’s is prevent these types of injuries,” he said. “I don’t think, back in 1998, that a lot of schools knew about preventative stretching and stuff like that. But there is a way of strengthening these muscles so that you won’t hurt them.”D’Agostino says he enjoyed his experiences at Salem very much, but the opportunity to coach at his alma mater was just too hard to resist.”People tell me I made a mistake, going from a Division 1 to a Division 3 school,” he said. “But I’m very happy with what I’ve chosen to do with my life.”