KAZL Split Women

Games at the Small Hall of SC Gripe rarely draw more than a few hundred people, though the room holds 1,000. It is where the players trained under the woman whose name the club still carries in its official title, the Žana Lelas Basketball Academy, long after the Olympic silver medallist who founded it with her husband, Vjekoslav Lokica, is gone.

The academy was registered in Split in July 2016, though people around the club tend to date its real start to when the women's side moved up into the Premijer liga, a couple of years later. Lelas died in 2021, and the Croatian Basketball Federation has marked her memory since; the club she built keeps working from the same gym in red, black and white.

Split has not troubled the top of the senior women's game domestically, without a national championship or cup to its name, but the junior sides have kept reaching finals they do not always win — runner-up finishes at under-19 level in 2021 and at under-17 level in three different seasons since. The one trophy the senior team has lifted came from outside Croatia: the first Alpe Adria Cup for women, won in Maribor in 2023 after a 88-85 final against VBO Maribor.

No nickname beyond the plain "Splićanke" has stuck to the team, which says something about a club still known, on court and off it, mostly by the name of the woman who started it.