For those on water polo's bubble, the future can be simple, if not easy: Fourth-seeded Hawai'i needs to win today and tomorrow to reach its third consecutive NCAA Championship.

The fourth-seeded Rainbow Wahine (15-8) are the overwhelming favorites in this morning's first-round Mountain Pacific Sports Federation Championship match against 13th-seeded Pacific (5-23). Tomorrow's match, like most in the MPSF, has no favorite.

The Rainbows expect to see fifth-seeded San Diego State, in a match to determine who goes to NCAAs.

Hawai'i won a similar match last year, bouncing Cal and then shocking top-ranked USC to reach its first MPSF tournament final. They hope for similar success this weekend at Arizona State's Mona Plummer Aquatic Center, even without 2006 MPSF Player of the Year Iefke Van Belkum.

The unspoken battle at ASU is to find the best of the rest. The top three seeds — Stanford, UCLA and USC — are all but assured a berth in the eight-team NCAA Championship next month. So are the country's four other league champions.

That leaves one at-large berth, and essentially six MPSF teams with a shot at it. Fourth-year UH coach Michel Roy characterizes teams 4 to 9 in the MPSF as "within a goal" of each other.

He is just as honest about his team. It is not as good as last year's, according to Roy, because Van Belkum is playing with the Dutch national team. But it is better than expected.

"Our strength is our goalie (senior Meike De Nooy)," Roy said. "Iefke is one of the greatest players I've ever seen, but it helps to have a goalie who can stop the ball. Meike has been a major contributor the last three years.

"We have the talent, the speed, the size, the experience. We just need a little mental toughness. What Iefke brought in was the belief that 'Nobody is better than us. I can score on anyone and I can stop anyone.' She had an amazing attitude toward winning. I don't know if the girls now see themselves beating those three teams. It could happen though."

His seniors will have much to say about it, along with leading scorer Kelly Mason and a bunch of 'Bows who have kept UH in the top five nationally by diversifying their offense, and taking advantage of De Nooy's quickness, anticipation and uncommon ability to stuff shooters.

De Nooy and Mason were third-team All-Americans last year while senior Kristy Bagnall was making a remarkable recovery from shoulder surgery that kept her out in 2005. She is now among the top four in scoring, steals and kick-outs drawn, despite a recurrence of the pain that keeps her out of practice.

"It's still day-to-day, pretty painful," Bagnall said. "The hardest thing is to see the end in sight, but it never seems to come quick enough for me. I love everyday and I love practicing and playing, but it's so close and I know my shoulder can't take much more."

NOTES

Kristy Bagnall, from Australia, married Andrew Gregory in December. She will graduate next month and teach elementary and special education students here. Meike De Nooy will return to The Netherlands to play with her national team. Roosevelt graduate Brittany Dames, the third senior, will graduate in physics and spend the next year doing research at Cambridge and traveling through Europe.

Reach Ann Miller at amiller@honoluluadvertiser.com.