Over the next month, a handful of Hawaii swimmers have a shot at punching their ticket to the Olympics. Jasmine Alkhaldi, fresh off her freshman year at the University of Hawaii, probably packs the biggest punch.

The sprinter from the Philippines ended her season with three personal bests at the Western Athletic Conference Championships and honorable mention on the Mid-Major All-America list. She is a matter of milliseconds from Olympic qualifying times in the 50- and 100-meter freestyle races.

Alkhaldi would like to take care of that this week, at the Southeast Asia Championships in Singapore.

"My goal is to break my best time in Singapore, then get a qualifying time," Alkhaldi said before going home at the end of May. "If I ever get it, I hope to break it again."

UH coach Victor Wales calls Alkhaldi the "primary female swimmer" in the Philippines. He believes if she makes an Olympic B qualifying time in the next month she will swim in London. Even if she doesn’t she could go, because no one in her country can beat her.

She is a poster child for the country’s state-of-the-art national training center at Trace College in Los Banos. Hawaii’s Christel Simms and Daniel Coakley helped inspire the center by qualifying to swim for the Philippines at the last Olympics. According to Alkhaldi, only one swimmer on that team actually lived in the Philippines, continuing a troubling trend.

The center was designed to create a home base of exceptional swimmers and terminate the trend. Alkhaldi spent her final five years of school in Los Banos, driving 21⁄2 hours to get home on the weekend.

"If Jasmine gets to go to the Games then they did it," Wales said. "The experiment worked."

Alkhaldi believes the center not only helped her in the pool, it helped her make the distant transition to college in Manoa much easier.

"I was used to being away — that part was not hard," she said. "The hard part was the culture. It was different from back home. I had to get used to that and the academic stuff. I didn’t study that hard ever. That was different for me. Living alone and training …that was the easy part. I was used to it."

Simms’ coach introduced the idea of UH to Alkhaldi. Wales clinched it with a visit to the training center, also convincing classmate Jose Gonzales, from Mindanao, to come here. Wales characterizes Alkhaldi’s freshman year as "great," athletically and academically.

"It’s just her work ethic," Wales says. "She’s part of a generation of athletes in the Philippines that has bettered themselves through athletics. She comes from a small town. She’s used swimming as a vehicle not only to reach her potental as an athlete but also as a student-athlete. She comes to a U.S. university, this very intelligent girl from a very good family, and appreciates the opportunity, makes the most of it. She works hard in the pool, puts in extra time in the weight room. She gets it."

She is not alone this Olympic summer. Five current and former UH swimmers have already qualified for the U.S. Olympic Team Trials, June 25-July 2 in Omaha, Neb. That’s four more than four years ago, and there could be others.

The list is led by Ilia Reyes from Molokai, who walked on five years ago and became team captain. Outgoing seniors Perry Sharify and Sean Reilly will also go, as will redshirt sophomore Ian Wheeler. Junior college transfer Christa Prior, another Mid-Major honorable mention who collected a gold, two silver and two bronze medals at her final WAC Championships, is the only Wahine so far.

Two other former UH swimmers are going to the Games for other countries. Melanie Schlanger made her second Australian Olympic team. She won a bronze medal in the 4×100 relay in Beijing. This year she won her first national title (100 freestyle) and earned a place on the 4×200 relay team. She is also studying to be a doctor.

Azad Al-barazi, another JC transfer who walked on at UH, will swim for Syria.