There’s a special kind of energy that trails Iva Koleva onto the court, something between quiet certainty and a spark that can turn a game. At 16, the North Macedonian guard/forward (depending on what her team needs that day) is already playing up in two demanding environments: the Under-18 competition and the women’s Second League with ZKK Tim Arena. She carries herself with the ease of someone who’s been told she’s too young and then went out and proved “young” can still mean ready.

From tennis courts to hardwood, discovering the joy of a team sport

Her road to the game took a few unexpected turns. Iva grew up in a family that moves, really moves. “I like to do a lot of sports. I was always active and in my family there are a lot of sportive people, most of them are football players,” she explains. Naturally, tiny Iva wanted to follow the ball she saw most. “When I was little I wanted to play football because I was always playing with my brother.

The kids in my neighborhood were going to tennis and I started with tennis. Tennis was my first sport but I didn’t really like it because there weren’t any games. I wanted to compete with someone.” That need, to measure herself against others and to feel resistance and rise through it, became the compass point for everything that followed.

Basketball arrived like a door swinging open. “In the first, I wasn’t taking it seriously, but I realized how good I am actually. And I started taking it more seriously.” The first practices were a revelation, the feeling of being pulled into something faster, more collective, more alive than anything she’d known. “It was really good. I liked the game. I like team sport,” she says, then adds the core of her competitive DNA with a smile you can hear: “And I like to compete, yes.”

Growing up fast at ZKK Tim Arena

Since 2019 she has grown up inside ZKK Tim Arena. “I’m playing six years, from 2019,” she says, matter-of-fact, like you’d say you’ve outgrown a jacket. The club has been a proving ground and a launchpad. This season she’s balancing two fronts: under 18 and the Second League, no small load for a 16-year-old. “Yes, because we are a younger team. We don’t have senior players,” she explains. That absence of veterans forces a kind of accelerated responsibility; it’s challenging, but it has made her fearless.

Her first taste of the women’s Second League came early. “I first played, I think, two seasons ago when I was 15 years old,” she says. The memory lands with the warm pride of a risk that paid off. “There were girls born 2004, ’05, ’06 and I was playing with them. I like to play with older girls, it’s more challenging and interesting to me. And it was really good, I was playing in the first five, in the starting five, and it was a really good experience.”

That group pushed further than anyone expected. “We were also playing play-offs for the First League, to get in the First League,” Iva recalls. The run ended before the last step, but the map was drawn. Last season, the Second League didn’t run. “Last season we didn’t have the Second League,” she notes, so this year feels like a return to a path left mid-stride.

Iva’s goals carry the impatience of someone who knows exactly how hard she’s worked. “This year I’m playing under 18 and Second League. With this generation, last year in under 16, we won third place, we played Final Four and we were third. Now with the same generation we’re playing under 18, that’s one year older girls with us, you know. I think we can win some place, we are going to get in the Final Four this time. And for the Second League I think we can finish first or second, third place.” It’s charming that she lists three possible medals; it’s telling that her voice lifts on the first two.

First steps on the European stage

If the club season shapes her, the national team sharpens her. Last summer, Iva stepped onto the European stage with North Macedonia’s youth program. “That was my first time. I played with the girls under 18 and I was only 15 years old, I was one of the youngest girls,” she says. The learning curve was steep and exhilarating. “It was a great experience, my first experience with the national teams at EuroBasket. I saw the other players from the other countries and it makes me work harder, it gave me motivation.”

Motivation is the word she returns to again and again, like a drumbeat. She isn’t the type to rattle off stat lines; she tracks progress in courage and consistency. She talks about the “dynamic game” and the joy of seeing her team lean into that speed, and she cherishes being part of a system that rewards relentlessness. “I like the game,” she says, every time, as if reminding herself why the sacrifices make sense.

Talk to her coaches and teammates and you hear about a player who fills the spaces between plays, hustling back, communicating, cracking the game open at exactly the moment it tilts. Talk to Iva and you hear about the simple, stubborn pursuit of a higher standard. “It feels very exciting and it gave me more motivations to train and to work harder,” she says of those national-team battles. What she doesn’t say outright, but what her path makes obvious, is that the work is already happening: early mornings, late shots, film sessions where she pauses and rewinds until an angle becomes a habit.

Chasing finals and building confidence