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MONTREAL – It’s hard to believe now, as the Omnium Banque Nationale site has been buzzing for 10 days and the fans are filling the stands, what this place was like exactly five years ago.

Sometimes it feels like another century, another life. But in Aug. 2020, the tournament was cancelled before of COVID. And after a five-month stoppage at the professional level, tennis was just starting up again.

But not in Montreal. Rather, with all of the pro events in Canada cancelled until the end of the year, Tennis Canada put together a four-city tournament tour, so that its young and rising players could at least have some match competition.

Since March, all they had done was train, and wait.

And so – with much free time on our hands – we moseyed over to the site, Expos’ mask in place as an hommage to its former tenants.

What we found was a ghost town.

Weeds were sprouting up between the concrete blocks, underneath and next to the seating. There was graffiti all over the place. Empty beer bottles. And no people – except for a few tennis players battling it out on the Grandstand court.

Here’s what it looked like this week.

And here’s what it looked like then. Hard to believe now.

The “Défi du Nord”

The context at the time was that everything was cancelled.

Everything. Junior events, masters events, Challenger events for both men and women across the country, learn-to-play events, ITFs, and of course the big WTA event in Montreal.

Tennis Canada put together the “tour” to four Montreal cities that normally would have hosted events – Montreal, Granby (the joint Challenger), Laval and Repentigny, which plays host to a major junior event that is a tuneup for the junior US Open.

(Earlier in the summer, there had been a sort of league taking place at Stade IGA that included Gabriel Diallo and Alexis Galarneau, among many others).

(There was that …. one day when Tennis Canada decided that if you wanted to play tennis indoors, you had to wear a mask while you did it. Even for singles. So … just for kicks, we decided to try it. It was … pretty awful. Mercifully, they came to their senses quickly).

The first was held during the week, on the Grandstand court. There were no locker facilities, and one bathroom was open.

The other three events were held over the next three weekends – and when the players went down to Granby, for example, they couldn’t even stay over in the town that’s about 1 1/2 hours from Montreal; they came back every night.

Among the players who took part was … Omnium Banque Nationale semifinalist Victoria Mboko, who was 13 going on 14 at the time. And Marina Stakusic.

Rogers Cup a casualty as Quebec government extends shutdown

What a difference five years makes.

Mboko had already left Canada and was down at the IMG (Bollettieri) Academy in Bradenton, Fla. training. But when the pandemic hit, it shut down. And so she came back home.

Here’s a piece written about her right around that time.

Wednesday night, she’ll be looking for her first WTA final – and at the WTA 1000 level, too.

***Mboko in 2020, when tennis stopped (Photo: Tennis Canada)***

Défi du Nord players

Women:

Mélodie Collard, Catherine Denysiewicz-Slowek, Sarah-Maude Fortin, Mia Kupres, Raphaelle Lacasse, Catherine Leduc, Victoria Mboko, Dharani Niroshan, Noëlly Nsimba, Orly Ogilvy, Marina Stakusic and Annabelle Xu.

Men:

Christophe Clément, Kamen Damov, Sid Donarski, Washi Gervais, Dan Martin, Nicolas Ocana Lavoie, Maxime St-Hilaire and Jaden Weekes.

On the day we stopped in, Donarski, in blue, was playing Damov (above).

We wanted to see Mboko, who was already on our radar at the time. But it took so long to find an entrance to even get into the place that we missed her.

The masked line umpires bring you back. The scoring system with the numbered placards and the … orange cone were … a trip.

In the end, it was Donarski and Mélodie Collard on the women’s side who were the big winners, after the finale in Granby.

Where are they now?

One thing is for sure. If you were of a certain age in your tennis development, the pandemic coming along stopped you in your tracks. Since there’s no alternate universe, they’ll never know what might have been.

That’s true in all other aspects of the planet too, though. Not just tennis.

It was a little-publicized fact at the time that a lot of the players were still training at the national centre indoors, even though it was shut to everyone else and pretty much against all the guidelines.

Notably, for Collard – who had reached the junior Grand Slam level in 2019 and teamed up with Leylah Fernandez in doubles at Roland Garros – it was a sudden halt. A talented athlete with a great game, her opportunity to do some big things in the juniors and use it as a launching pad was cut off.

Collard and Fernandez won the doubles at the Saguenay Challenger in the fall of 2019.

She was in the top 20 in the ITF junior rankings to start 2020 (No. 17) at age 16. She didn’t play for 14 months after that – and even then, just a few more events.

We wrote about her two years ago.

Quebecer Collard returns to competitive tennis

It appears, with the help of UVA’s NIL collective, that she might be trying the pros now, at age 22.

Many of the men (and boys) who completed in this tour went on to college – most of them at Canada South – i.e. the University of Kentucky.

Noëlly Nsimba, who competed on this Tour, graduated from Youngstown State in kinesiology and has become a recording artist and actually sang the national anthem before opening night this year.

Let’s hope we don’t ever have to go through that again.