Aryna Sabalenka opens the North American hard-court swing as the No. 1 seed at the National Bank Open, but the draw released Friday delivered the harder assignment to almost everyone chasing her. Elena Rybakina, Coco Gauff, Naomi Osaka and newly crowned Wimbledon champion Linda Noskova were all placed in the bottom half of the bracket.
Main-draw play began Sunday at Sobeys Stadium and runs through Aug. 13. The women’s event is a 96-player draw, with the top 32 seeds receiving first-round byes into the second round on Tuesday and Wednesday. Total prize money is $7,433,076, and the singles champion collects $1,085,220 along with 1,000 ranking points. It is the second year of the expanded 12-day format. The tournament alternates cities annually, and the women are in Toronto this year while the men play the Masters 1000 event in Montreal.
Sabalenka is the top seed in Toronto for the first time in her career, and her section is the kinder one. She opens against Cristina Bucsa or a qualifier, with Jelena Ostapenko a possible third-round opponent and Ekaterina Alexandrova projected in the fourth round. Elina Svitolina and Amanda Anisimova sit at the far end of that quarter, with Anisimova the projected quarterfinal opponent.
The imbalance sits below her. Gauff, the No. 4 seed, opens against Diane Parry or a qualifier and shares a quarter with Noskova, Belinda Bencic, Alexandra Eala, Emma Navarro, Iva Jovic and Maria Sakkari. A Gauff-Noskova quarterfinal is the projected outcome. Noskova, seeded sixth, is playing her first tournament since winning Wimbledon, and she has drawn a section deep enough to test how well that title has settled.
Rybakina occupies the final quarter and faces the winner of Daria Kasatkina and Xinyu Wang, with Barbora Krejcikova projected in the fourth round. Mirra Andreeva, the No. 5 seed, anchors the other end of that block, and Osaka is seeded 11th in the same section. The bracket therefore allows a Rybakina-Osaka quarterfinal, which would be a rematch of last year’s final.
Osaka arrives in uncertain form. She lost her Washington semifinal to Eala on Saturday, 6-4, 6-2, in the pair’s first career meeting. She opens in Toronto against the winner of Eva Lys and Panna Udvardy. Eala, seeded 25th, landed in Gauff’s quarter.
Jessica Pegula heads the second quarter as the No. 3 seed and the most recent Toronto champion, having won back-to-back National Bank Open titles in 2023 and 2024. She contested the Washington final on Sunday and opens here against Magdalena Frech or a qualifier. Iga Swiatek, seeded seventh after a season-long slide, sits at the opposite end of the same quarter, with Madison Keys, Marta Kostyuk, Diana Shnaider and Donna Vekic stacked between them. It is the deepest quarter in the top half by ranking.
Venus Williams received one of eight main-draw wild cards and opens against Kamilla Rakhimova, with Katerina Siniakova projected next and Pegula two rounds beyond that. Bianca Andreescu, Kayla Cross, Katherine Sebov, Cadence Brace, Rebecca Marino, Ariana Arseneault and Carol Zhao took the remaining wild cards.
Eleven Grand Slam champions are in the field. Four former National Bank Open winners are entered: Pegula, Andreescu, who won in 2019, Svitolina, the 2017 champion, and Bencic, who took the title in 2015.
The field is thinner than it might have been. Victoria Mboko withdrew with a knee injury sustained during the grass season, leaving the tournament without its defending champion. Karolina Muchova, Jasmine Paolini, Emma Raducanu and Hailey Baptiste are also absent, which pulled four seeded players out of the bracket and moved Eala into the seedings at No. 25 despite a ranking of No. 28.
For American viewers the draw is well distributed. Pegula, Keys, Navarro, Anisimova, Jovic and Williams are spread across three quarters, and Gauff is the only one of them in the crowded half. Peyton Stearns, McCartney Kessler, Caty McNally, Taylor Townsend, Alycia Parks and Ann Li round out the domestic contingent, the largest of any nation in the field.
Toronto is the first of two WTA 1000 tournaments before the final major, with Cincinnati following immediately afterward in a compressed swing that leaves little recovery time. Seeding positions for the US Open remain unsettled, and two weeks of 1,000-point events will decide most of them. The semifinals are scheduled for Aug. 12, with the final the following day.
