"Looking up to some of these coaches as an athlete and then meeting them (when I first got into coaching) and seeing all the championships their programs had won and trying to pick their brains and just be around them, just imagining your team winning a league title or a state championship seemed so far away.
"It feels like, while I still have a lot left in my career, it's kind of one of those (milestones) that you don't necessarily think about when you get into coaching," said Zopatti, a Weymouth High grad who lives in Plymouth with his wife Adrienne and three children - twins Martin and Genevieve, age 6, and William, age 4. And so it was that Zopatti, just 41, was inducted into the Massachusetts State Track Coaches Association Hall of Fame last month, joining recent local honorees such as Hingham's Fred Jewett (2015), Norwell's Chuck Martin (2017), Quincy/North Quincy's Geoff Hennessey (2018) and Marshfield's Ed Ryan (2018).
That type of resume is bound to get you noticed. In indoor/outdoor track, which he co-coaches with Jocko Rooney, his cross country assistant. His boys and girls teams have won 11 state divisional championships since 2008. He also led those boys teams to back-to-back appearances at the Nike Cross Nationals - a first for a Massachusetts school. Zopatti's boys cross country teams won six straight EMass divisional crowns from 2008-13 and won four out of five small-school All-State titles from 2009-13.
More: Birdies, hat tricks and digs: Vote for the High School Athlete of the Week After all, in his 17 years at Pembroke, he has taken those middle-school raw materials and molded them into champions many times over. Given his track record (excuse the pun), you would have to say that Zopatti's powers of persuasion are pretty strong.