American Madison Keys will play Quebec City WTA tournament in September

Regardless of the time slot – it used to be at the end of October – the small WTA Tour stop in Quebec City has had issues attracting top names in recent years.

Last year, Venus Williams agreed to play after her tour de force performance at the Rogers Cup in Montreal, and was a huge hit.

No Venus this year for the event, held the week after the US Open from Sept. 12-20. But the organizers have been able to convince top-20 player Madison Keys, a rising star from the U.S., to take a wild card.

The tournament also announced on Wednesday that former world No. 21 Aleksandra Wozniak, on the comeback trail after shoulder surgery that has kept her out exactly a year, received a wild card into ... the qualifying.

Keys, 20, reached the Australian Open semi-finals this year. No doubt she heard good things about the tournament – then called the Challenge Bell, now the Coupe Banque Nationale – from coach Lindsay Davenport, who played it once late in her career.

Davenport took a year off when she had her first child, son Jagger, from Sept. 2006 to Sept. 2007 (she has since had three more children). Upon her return, she played a couple of tournaments in Asia then headed to chilly Quebec City with coach Adam Peterson, her son and a nanny in tow.

Then officially ranked No. 126, Davenport won the event (she defeated Wozniak, a young Angelique Kerber and No. 24 ranked Vera Zvonareva along the way) and was charmed by the city.

It's entirely possible, had the tournament not been able to entice a name, that Wozniak – long the top Canadian female player before the rise of Genie Bouchard – might have gotten that main-draw wild card.

The tournament was certainly open to having Bouchard play, even though she hasn't participated since 2013 when, as the No. 5 seed, she lost to No. 3 seed Lucie Safarova in the semifinals.

She is idle that week, but has entered Tokyo the week of Sept. 21, Wuhan (a Premier 5 on the level of the Rogers Cup) the week after that, and Beijing (a Premer Mandatory-level event) the week after that. She also has entered a fourth tournament in four weeks, a small event in Hong Kong, the week of Oct. 12, to close out her season.

No matter; the 27-year-old Wozniak needs matches more than anything.

She returned to action this week at a $25,000 tournament in Winnipeg, Manitoba with a wild card (her current, real ranking just fell out of the top 900 after her long absence), and has won her first two matches to reach the quarter-finals.

Wozniak's first victory was over Rosie Johanson, who is part of the national training centre program in Montreal. On Wednesday, she defeated 17-year-old Ingrid Neel 6-3, 6-3. Neel had defeated Wozniak's fellow québécoise, Françoise Abanda, in the first round.