Jill Craybas, who is ranked in the top 100 in the world for the eighth consecutive year, should know by the beginning of next month whether she is going to Beijing for a shot at competing for the U.S. Olympic tennis team.

AP / Ed Betz

She defied the odds when she packed her racket in 1992, left her home in East Greenwich for the University of Texas and helped the Longhorns to the 1993 NCAA championship.

She defied them again when she overcame two years of injuries, transferred to the University of Florida and led the Gators to the 1996 NCAA championship, becoming the first woman to win national titles at different schools.

She has defied them for the last decade as a regular on the WTA Tour, a 5-foot, 3-inch grinder who is ranked in the top 100 in the world for the eighth consecutive year.

And she hopes to defy them again by being named to the U.S. Olympic Team in the next two weeks.

Jill Craybas calls Huntington Beach, Calif., home now, but to people who remember her growing up in East Greenwich and playing tennis at Lincoln School in Providence, she will always be a Rhode Islander. And this Rhode Islander, who turned 34 on July 4, may have a chance to play tennis against the best players in the world at the 2008 Olympic Games at Beijing next month.

Craybas is the fourth alternate on the direct acceptance list for Olympic tennis, which will be played Aug. 10-17 at the Olympic Tennis Center in Beijing. That means four players will have to withdraw from the 56-woman field for her to make the team. That’s an unlikely development, said Tim Curry of the U.S. Tennis Association, but as he said, “Never say never.”

The USTA has selected Venus and Serena Williams and Lindsay Davenport to play singles, and the Williams sisters and Davenport and Liezel Huber to play doubles. They qualified for direct acceptance based on their computer rankings of June 9, the day after the French Open concluded.

Serena Williams was ranked No. 6, Venus Williams No. 7 and Davenport No. 26 in singles. Huber was ranked No. 1 in doubles. A native of South Africa, she became a U.S. citizen last July in the hope of competing in the Olympics for the United States.

The first three alternates the International Tennis Federation will tap, if necessary, are Kateryna Bondarenko of Ukraine (No. 69), Edina Gallovits of Romania (No. 72) and Akiko Morigama of Japan (No. 73).

American Ashley Harkleroad was ranked No. 74 at the time and fourth in line but has since decided to skip the Olympics to concentrate on improving her ranking on the women’s tour. Craybas, ranked No. 75 after the French Open, moved to fourth from fifth on the waiting list.

The maximum number of singles players per nation is four, but the Williams sisters and Davenport were the only Americans with qualifying rankings. Craybas was ranked as high as No. 62 but dropped to No. 79 after her first-round losses at the French, DFS Classic at Birmingham, England, and Wimbledon.

Given her size and her having come from the smallest state in the nation, Craybas has had a remarkable career in professional tennis.

Her lifetime record in singles is 314-294. She can boast of one WTA Tour singles title and three doubles crowns. She has won $1.6 million in prize money and has been ranked as high as No. 39 in the world (April 2006). She has played in every Grand Slam tournament since the 2001 Australian Open, her best showing coming at Wimbledon in 2005, when she upset No. 4 Serena Williams in the third round. She has played on the U.S. Federation Cup team.

Craybas has played 16 tournaments this year and has a 14-16 match record. She reached the final of the Pattaya Open in Thailand in February and lost to top-seeded Agnieszka Radwanska of Poland in a third-set tie-breaker. She got to the semifinals of the Abieto Mexicano Telcel at Acapulco later in February and lost to second-seeded Alize Cornet of France in straight sets.

Craybas should know by the beginning of next month if she is going to Beijing.

After that, any player who withdraws will be replaced by a player on site.

mszostak@projo.com