At a recent swim meet at SFU, two more Haney Seahorse swimmers qualified for the first time Age-Group National Championship meet to be held in August this year.

Jordan Morford and Emily Halajian qualified under the time standard in the 200-metre backstroke and 1,500-metre freestyle, respectively.

These two swimmers are in addition to Reeghan Osmond and Dane Simmons who qualified in March and bring the total number of current national level Seahorse swimmers to four.

Osmond qualified for Western National Championships in the 200-metre freestyle and Simmons also qualified in the 1,500-metre freestyle at the provincial championship meet.

Jordan Morford was the first of the two new swimmers to qualify by earning his time in backstroke with a time of two minutes and twenty-one seconds.

The race was quite exciting with Morford using his improved leg power, improved technique and faster arm turnover to improve his previous best by two and a half seconds.

"So far Jordan has seen a dramatic drop in his 200-metre backstroke time since September," said Seahorse head coach Jonathan Gilman.

"However, he has also seen dramatic improvements in all areas of his swimming in all strokes over all distances. The overall improvements in all areas of swimming contributed to his dramatic improvement in his backstroke."

Later in the same day at the SFU meet, Seahorse rookie Emily Halajian was only one of two swimmers entered in the 1500-metre freestyle.

Swimming alone without anyone to help race or pace her, she narrowly qualified for the Age-Group National standard by just over one second in a 19-minute and 11-second race.

"It was pretty exciting to see Emily qualify for her first national level swim meet," Gilman said.

"Emily strives in distance races and right now it looks like that is where she will see most success as a swimmer. She has proved herself to be a national level distance swimmer and I look forward to seeing the results at the next provincials in July."

Gilman still has big plans for the Seahorse team in the next few months, especially at the provincial championships to be held in Kamloops in July.

"The first goal is to have more current national qualifiers swimming on the team this year than the total sum of all national level swimmers in the entire history of the club.

"The second goal is to score more team points at the July provincials than the history of the club.

"The third goal is score more team points at this provincials than the total sum of all team points scored at both short course and long course meets combined over the previous ten years.

"At the beginning of the season in September, I promised a breakthrough swims for all the swimmers. Now, as my first year as head coach I promise to make this a breakthrough year for the club.

"All of these goals for the team underline my objective to have the 2009-2010 edition of the Seahorse team to be the fastest team ever assembled in the over twenty-five year history of the club."