He built a volleyball power on optimism. He’s fighting cancer the same way.

Barry Goldberg is an optimistic man, the kind who tells people it’s a great day regardless of the weather. For the past 33 years, he has built a dominant women’s volleyball program at American University, a school not known much for sports, by never obsessing over what others had and he didn’t. Instead, he says, he can’t believe he gets paid to coach volleyball.