By Brian Trusdell

When the CONCACAF Women's Under-17 Champion opens Wednesday in Costa Rica, the United States will be favored. Haiti will be everybody's favorite.

Less than two months after a 7.0 earthquake rocked the impoverished nation of 9 million, killing by some official estimates as many as 270,000, the girls of Haiti will carry the country's flag into competition. All of them now are homeless, including one - starting goalkeeper Madeline Delice - who has become an orphan.

"They constantly feel scared," Haitian tem delegation head Georgelie Berry said from the team's most recent training base in Panama. "Soccer is the only distraction in Haiti."

Berry herself escaped death on January 12 when the quake struck late in the afternoon, collapsing the Haitian Federation's Football headquarters in the center of the capital of Port-au-Prince and killing 32. She and federation President Yves Jean-Bart were among the few who managed to survive.

The team was training at Stade Sylvio Cator when the quake shook the country, Berry said, but it took time to re-gather them at the country's relatively undamaged FIFA Goal Project facility in the suburb of Croix-des-Boquets.

"The country is destroyed," Berry said. "The girls were in the street. It took two weeks to get them together at the Project Goal so they could be fed, get them some water and train."

Berry said all of the players were left without homes, and Delice, from the southern coastal city of Leogane which was the epicenter of the quake and where approximately 80 percent of the buildings were destroyed, lost both her mother and father.

With death and destruction all around, and pictures showing soccer stadiums and fields turned into makeshift tent cities, the team relocated to the neighboring country of the Dominican Republic on February 24 with the assistance of that country's football federation.

They arrived in Panama on Tuesday and will move to Costa Rica early next week.

Haiti, which won all three of its Caribbean qualifying games by a combined score of 30-0, opens the tournament on Wednesday against the defending champion and perennial power United States, which was runner-up to Korea DPR at the inaugural Under-17 Women's World Cup in 2008.

The eight teams are vying for two berths in this year's World Cup, but Haiti already is drawing praise simply for managing to compete at the CONCACAF championship. Trying to prepare to play while their home lies in ruins, with their family and friends still suffering, is, to say the least, a challenge.

"It just makes them want to win for their country, which has nothing - nothing to eat," Berry said. "It inspires them to want to win."

While expressing gratitude to the Dominican Republic and Panama for their generosity to enable them to train, Berry said the girls feel a sense of guilt that they have food, water and shelter and are training while those in Haiti have death and despair tugging at their elbow.

The first round of the CONCACAF championship will run through March 15 with the winner to be crowned five days later. After that, the fate of the Haitian team is unknown.

"As of now, we do not have a plan," Berry said. "The fear now is they will go back to the streets. They don't have a bed or know where their next meal is coming from. I have heard they may go back to the Project Goal, but I don't know if there is enough water or food there."