When Melchie Dumornay arrived at Haiti’s national soccer-training facility, outside Port-au-Prince, in 2013, she was called Piti, which is Haitian Creole for “small.” She was more than a head shorter than all the other players, and only ten years old. Too small and too young, federation officials thought; they nearly sent her back home to Mirebalais, a mountainous commune northeast of the capital. But she had grown up playing soccer barefoot with older, bigger boys, and she was determined to compete. A coach relented and let her scrimmage. Within two years, she was playing for the under-fifteen national team. At fourteen, she won the Golden Ball at CONCACAF Women’s Under-17 Championship, a tournament that includes the United States.
That same year, 2018, she led the under-twenty national team to its first U-20 World Cup appearance, in France. That’s where Amandine Miquel, the coach of Stade de Reims, a team in France’s top division, first saw her. Miquel was there to watch the Germans, but immediately recognized that the biggest talent was on the other side. Haiti had been eliminated from advancing in the tournament before the match even began, but, as Dumornay recently told the TV network Eurosport, in a short documentary, “We played with a lot of heart, and I don’t think the German players will ever forget that game.”
Miquel didn’t: she spent years recruiting Dumornay, as did the coaches of other clubs from all over the world. But Reims was known for developing young players, and, in 2021, when Dumornay turned eighteen, she signed with Reims. In her last eighteen games for Reims, Dumornay scored eleven goals and had six assists; earlier this year, she signed with Olympique Lyonnais, one of the giants of women’s soccer. (The team won five straight Champions League titles between 2016 and 2020.) “I haven’t seen any player as good as she is,” Miquel told Eurosport.
It has been an exciting but also a difficult time for soccer in Haiti. Camp Nou, also known as the Ranch, was built after the 2010 earthquake that demolished large portions of Port-au-Prince and killed more than two hundred thousand people. Among those who died were some of the officials and coaches from Haiti’s soccer federation. The Ranch was not luxurious, but it had offices, an auditorium, fields, and enough dorms for two hundred players. Much of the women’s team grew up there together, and, this year, as they made their improbable journey through the World Cup qualifiers, they have spoken of the closeness and camaraderie they developed during those years.
But more than one player in the program has accused Haitian soccer officials, including the former president of the national soccer federation, Yves Jean-Bart, of sexual harassment and abuse. A FIFA investigation concluded that Jean-Bart was guilty; he was fined just over a million dollars and banned by FIFA for life. He vehemently denied the accusations, and appealed the decision with the Court of Arbitration for Sport, a ruling body that oversees such cases. Just days before Haiti achieved its historic World Cup qualification, with a win against Chile, he won his appeal. Recently, the Washington Post published a story detailing serious issues with FIFA’s handling of both the original case and Jean-Bart’s appeal; all the players who spoke to the Post, whether they supported Jean-Bart or opposed him, requested anonymity, saying that they feared the consequences, and some even feared for their lives.
Two years ago, Haiti’s President, Jovenel Moïse, was assassinated. Gangs now control most of Port-au-Prince; Camp Nou is closed. The national team has been training outside the country—in the Dominican Republic, Switzerland, and elsewhere—when it has been able to train at all. (The coach of the team, Nicolas Delépine, who is French, has been to Haiti only once.) When the World Cup trophy, during its tour of qualifying countries, visited Haiti, it did so under heavy security, without a party or parade. In the midst of all this, the women’s national team has inspired the country, and the diaspora. “We needed a bit of good news,” Garry Pierre-Pierre, the founder and publisher of the Haitian Times, told me. The soccer team—and Dumornay in particular—delivered some.
In March, Haiti, then ranked fifty-fifth in the world, faced Chile, in a playoff to qualify for the World Cup. Dumornay settled a high arcing ball and with a quick clever step ricocheted a pass up the field, then began to sprint toward the goal. The ball was returned to her in stride. She sent it ahead and caught up with it, striking it with her left foot as she tumbled to the ground, lofting it over the leaping goalkeeper. Then, late in stoppage time, she rolled the ball in after beating the back line. She looked, in those moments, like one of the best players in the world.
She has been the revelation of the Women’s World Cup so far. Goals have been hard to come by; Australia’s Sam Kerr, perhaps the best scorer in the world, has been injured, and her team, one of the host nations, barely survived the group stage. The U.S. team, which arrived as favorites, have underperformed. But the diminutive midfielder from Haiti has electrified crowds with her intensity. Every time that Dumornay touches the ball, she demands attention—but off the ball she is deceptive and dangerous, too. Her decisive first touches, her agility, her balance, her vision, and her control of the ball under pressure—and at varying speeds—make her one of the most thrilling attacking players in the world. And her quickness makes her an underrated defender, as England found out when it faced Haiti in both teams’ first match of the group stage.
England is ranked fourth in the world. But, in that match, Dumornay was the best player on either side of the field. Although England dominated possession, no one could dominate Dumornay, who had fifty-eight touches. She neutralized England’s midfielder Keira Walsh and led Haiti’s counterattack, consistently creating threats with deep passes and deft dribbles. Against China, she missed the first half of the game with an injury, and then came on to start the second. She immediately had a good chance, nailing an acrobatic shot close to the keeper, who blocked it with a quick reaction. China lost a player to a red card early on and spent most of the match down a player, but Haiti struggled anyway, and lost an ugly game, 1–0. Even though China is nearly forty spots above Haiti in FIFA’s international rankings, it was a disappointing result. Haiti was not just happy to be here.
Dumornay has that thrilling quality of elusiveness: she seems to be everywhere and nowhere at once. But it isn’t only her skill or her athleticism that makes her so captivating. It is something more ineffable and more general—something to do with her creative genius, but also her spirit. She plays with uplifting confidence and élan.
“We’re going to do our country proud,” Dumornay told the Guardian, before the World Cup, “and we’re proud to be able to bring joy to all those people who believe in us and who continue to support us.” In some sense, she has already fulfilled every hope. The team lost all three games it played, and failed to score a goal. Even so, it never seemed overwhelmed, and for large stretches evenly matched some of the top teams in the world. “This shows what Haiti can achieve,” Pierre-Pierre said, after the players’ close loss to England. He called them “a metaphor for what the country can be.”
That is a lot of weight to put on a small group of athletes, particularly given everything that the team has had to overcome. But Dumornay has played as though she doesn’t feel this at all. “Unbridled Joy, Pride Blankets Corventina’s Hometown in Haiti as She Takes the Field in WWC,” read a headline in the Haitian Times, last week. Corventina is a nickname that Dumornay’s older brother Corvington gave her. She is only five feet three, still small. But she is strong and broad-shouldered. Nobody knows her as Piti anymore. ♦
