Combine Academy and MVP Lane brought the Slovenia Global Showcase to Kranj from 29 to 31 October 2026, putting sixty players aged 11 to 19 through three days of combine testing, skills work and live games. By Saturday afternoon two teams had come through game day unbeaten — UCLA in the U14 NCAA League and New York in the U16 NBA League — and one 17-year-old had won every game he played.
At a glance
- Dates: 29 to 31 October 2026
- Venue: Kranj, Slovenia
- Players: 60 tested, ages 11 to 19, boys and girls
- Leagues: NCAA League (U14), NBA League (U16), EuroLeague (U19)
- Game day: nine games across two courts, 20 minutes running clock, every team played three
- Coaches: Joe Stasyszyn (USA Basketball), Nate Pausa (Combine Academy), and the MVP Lane staff
- Host: MVP Lane, Ljubljana
What happened
The showcase opened the way an NBA draft combine opens: with a tape measure. Players were split into six groups of ten and moved through height, wingspan and standing reach before anything else, then into the testing battery — the 21 metre sprint, lane agility, shuttle, the 21 metre run with a ball, and the vertical jump. Every number went onto a sheet with a jersey number on it, and nobody got to argue with the stopwatch.
Friday belonged to the work. Three large groups rotated through USA Basketball training with Coach Joe Stasyszyn and Coach Nate Pausa, a second Combine testing block, and Euro skills training, each group getting an hour and a quarter at every station. The afternoon broke the gym into specialist rooms: Shotlyzer shooting analysis, Myolab, media day, and athlete-specific movement analysis in the weight room.
Saturday was game day, and it was built to be relentless. Nine games ran across two courts between 09:00 and 13:30, each one ten minutes of warm-up and then twenty minutes of running clock, with every team playing three. The U14s opened as the NCAA League, the U16s followed as the NBA League, and the U19s closed each cycle as the EuroLeague — three rounds in which the rosters were torn up and rebuilt every time, so no player finished the day with the same teammates he started it with.
Standout performers
Jakob Lovrenčec, 18. The athlete of the showcase, and it was not close. He ran the fastest 21 metres in the building at 2.92 seconds, then did it again with a ball in his hands at 3.04, and added the second-best lane agility and the second-best vertical jump in the whole field.
Danila Kulkin, 19. The highest leap of the showcase at 91 centimetres, measured as touch height less standing reach.
Simon Šimetić, 17. Fastest lane agility of all sixty players at 10.56 seconds, with the third-fastest sprint behind him.
Anže Novak, 15. The single best shuttle time of the entire showcase, 2.57 seconds, beating every player in the two older bands.
Sergej Rašić, 17. The only player in the EuroLeague (U19) to win all three rounds. Rosters were remixed before every game, so he had to win with three different sets of teammates — Red Star, Barcelona and Panathinaikos — and he did.
Dávid Csányi, 15. The biggest frame at the showcase: 199 centimetres tall, 202 wingspan, 259 standing reach, and still quick enough to post the third-fastest shuttle in the field.
Lev Lautar, 13, and Tristan Iskra, 12. The youngest band produced its own leaders. Lautar jumped 74 centimetres and ran the quickest 21 metres with a ball in his group; Iskra ran the fastest flat sprint of the U14s at 3.58.
Lana Ljubič, 18, and Tana Osolnik, 16. Both finished second in their band against the boys — Ljubič in the shuttle and the sprint with a ball, Osolnik in the flat 21 metre sprint.
The teams
UCLA took the NCAA League (U14) at 3-0, finishing plus twenty on points and beating Duke 36-33 in the final slot to stay perfect. New York matched them in the NBA League (U16), also 3-0, and had to earn it: they and Miami finished on identical point differentials of plus thirty-three, so the title came down to their head-to-head meeting in the last game of the day, which New York won 32-30. The EuroLeague (U19) had no table, because the teams changed every round — Red Star, Barcelona and Panathinaikos each won once.
Coaches and education
The on-court teaching was led by Coach Joe Stasyszyn, a national USA Basketball speaker and clinician with more than thirty years in elite player development. Anyone who watched him work noticed the same thing: the drill never started until every player in the line was standing where he wanted them. Coach Nate Pausa of Combine Academy ran the Combine training alongside him, and between them the two put every athlete at the showcase through the same American development sequence, from the youngest U14 group to the U19s.
Coach Joe is a USA Basketball Gold Certified licensed coach, a Coaches Academy speaker and a regional clinic skills coach, and he has consulted for FIBA national and Olympic coaches through the International Coaches Apprenticeship for Basketball, the joint programme between USA Basketball, the US Olympic Committee and FIBA. Most recently he was lead speaker at the Boston Celtics Jr. NBA Coaches and Elite Player Clinic.
He also works closely with Duke University, where he is a twenty-year veteran of the men’s basketball programme and has built a long working relationship with the coaching staff, Coach Mike Krzyzewski among them. That lineage is not an abstraction for the players who came to Kranj: the footwork patterns, the spacing language and the standard of repetition that Coach Joe teaches are the ones used at USA Basketball’s own coaches academies.
Around them, the MVP Lane staff ran the specialist work that makes a combine more than a stopwatch — Shotlyzer shooting sessions, Myolab, athlete-specific movement analysis in the weight room, and Euro skills training.
Scouting and exposure
Combine Academy and NIL Plus Group scouts covered the talent level of the showcase. They watched every player through the testing, the skills sessions and the live-streamed games, and their evaluations go into each player’s individual scouting notes.
Those notes, together with the game film and testing results, give each player and family an honest picture of where they stand and which U.S. high school, prep and college pathways fit their level.
What the players take home
A showcase is only worth the three days if the player is still using it in six months. Over the three days every player trains with U.S. coaches and experiences American training methodology firsthand, completes physical performance testing and basketball skills testing, plays live-streamed games while the U.S. coaching staff writes individual scouting notes on them, takes part in a Media Day with professional photos, interviews and video clips, and attends workshops for players and parents on the NCAA, NIL, and how the U.S. school and college system works.
- YouTube links to all of their games
- Their Media Day photos and video links
- Their testing results, which they can compare with players from Combine Showcases in other countries
- Their individual scouting notes
That third one is quietly the most valuable. A 13-year-old in Kranj now has a vertical jump, a sprint time and a shuttle number that sit on the same scale as players measured at Combine Showcases in Norway, Wales, Germany, Australia, China and Thailand. Knowing you jumped 74 centimetres is useful. Knowing where that puts you among everyone else your age who has been through the same stopwatch is what changes how a player trains next season.
What’s next
The Combine Showcase tour moves on after Kranj. These are the next stops on the 2026–27 calendar:
- Germany Combine Showcase — Bremen, December 28–30, 2026, hosted by Basketball Akademie Bremen Süd, ages 12–20. Register here.
- Norway Elite Showcase — March 20–22, 2027, hosted by Elite Showcase Norway, venue to be announced. Follow for updates.
- Combine Summer Exposure Camp — Lincolnton, North Carolina, June 14 – July 26, 2027, hosted by Combine Academy, boys ages 14–19.
Full details for every showcase and camp are on the NIL Plus Group events page.
Close
Thanks to MVP Lane in Ljubljana for hosting, to Coach Joe Stasyszyn and Coach Nate Pausa for three days on the floor, and to every player who let a stopwatch tell them the truth about their sprint time.
