National Under-17 coach Andrew Edwards and Team Manager Howard Bell will attend the official draw for the CONCACAF Under-17 Championship, which takes place today at the Sheraton Grand Panama in Panama City, starting at 7:00 pm Jamaica time.

The official draw will see the three groups for the championship to be played in the Panamanian capital Panama City April 21-May 7, next year.

The tournament will benefit from a redesigned format, structured to increase the number of meaningful, competitive matches played by each team. The top-two teams from each of the three groups in the first stage will advance to the classification stage, where the confederation’s four tickets to the World Cup at this level will be determined in round-robin play among two groups of three teams each.

As host, Panama will be seeded at the top of one of the three groups; Mexico, as the current champion and Costa Rica, as the best-placed CONCACAF team from the last edition of the FIFA U-17 World Cup, excluding the regional champion and the host, will also be the other seeded countries.

The remaining nine qualified teams — Canada, Cuba, Curacao, El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica, Suriname and United States — will be drawn from pots 2-4 and placed in one of the groups. The positions of each group winner and runner-up from the group stage will be drawn randomly in group pairs into two groups (D and E) for the classification stage.

Jamaica’s representatives will attend a team workshop on December 14, where all delegates will have the opportunity to conduct site visits of the hotels, stadium and training grounds assigned to their teams.

The CONCACAF Under-17 Championship will be played at the Maracana and Rommel Fernandez stadiums in Panama City, Panama. The tournament will qualify four teams directly to the FIFA Under-17 World Cup India 2017.