In another signing for first-year head coach Carla Berube, the Wildcats locked down their second international addition of the offseason.
Will Northwestern women's basketball double their win total from last season (eight wins in '25-'26)
June opened with a bang for Northwestern’s women’s basketball team, signing another piece to the puzzle for the 2026-2027 season.
Romana Jelenc, a 6’3” forward from Slovenia, is joining the Wildcats as she makes the jump across the pond to play in America.
Jelenc is 18 years old from the town of Zelezniki. She has played for ZKK Cinkarna Celje in the Slovenian ZKL, on top of multiple stints on the Slovenian national team.
Cinkarna Celje is coming off a 20-3 start to their 2026 campaign, with Jelenc being a rotational bench piece for the team. Her best game came on April 1, where she posted nine points, six rebounds and two assists in just under twenty minutes.
At the international level, she has played 21 games between U16 and U18, including a nine-point, seven-rebound performance in a loss to Poland at the U18 European Championship.
Jelenc is a likely candidate to play for the FIBA Women’s EuroBasket Qualifier team for Slovenia, set for 2027.
This is another signing in the first offseason for first-year head coach Carla Berube, who has been active in the transfer portal and recruiting circuit in just over two months since taking the position.
Jelenc joins Sandra Moreno and Amparo Lopez as the third European on the Northwestern roster, along with being the second international addition after Australia’s Lily Carmody joined the team in late April.
Carmody, unlike Jelenc, has college experience. Australia's guard talent transferred in from Boston College, playing the 2025-2026 season with the Eagles after a 2024-2025 run with the Butler Bulldogs.
Under Berube's reign, it may be time for a renaissance when it comes to opportunities for international players on the Wildcats.
Moreno and Lopez are coming off freshman seasons where they both only played nine games each, but Berube is not a stranger to talent from overseas.
Berube was the head coach of the 2017 USA Women's U16 National Team, a team that went 5–0 and won a gold medal at the FIBA Americas U16 Championship. Berube would do the same in 2018 with the USA Women's U17 National Team at the FIBA U17 World Cup, building quite an international resume in just a few years of overseas experience.
A FIBA circuit that is littered with talent across the world, including Jelenc's Slovenia team.
Based on Berube and Co.’s active spring, this shouldn’t be the last announcement we see from the Wildcats as summer approaches.
