VANCOUVER — There is an old saying about how having vision can help you to see the impossible.

Those are words that Michael Chany understands all too well, because while his eyes have been witness to his own adversity, growing up in a financially challenged, single-parent environment on the city’s East Side, it’s been his innate inner vision which has steered him towards a future few may have predicted for him.

“I remember as a really young kid, I wanted to study astronomy,” begins Chany, a basketball star and freshly-minted Class of 2017 graduate of Gladstone Secondary School.

“I just always thought that it was cool to think that there could be something else out there, that there are places that we still haven’t discovered.”

Whether he knows it or not, that is the voice of hope within him talking.

And in no small way, it’s how the eldest child of a Sudanese refugee mom, at the age of 18, became the man of the house, both with his own family and his high school basketball team.

Now, come this fall, Michael Chany will beat back another set of odds as he begins collegiate life as both a student and basketball player at North Vancouver’s Capilano University.