Nela Lopušanová (born 26 February 2008) is šanováa Slovak ice hockey player, a winger, currently playing in the under-19 Mid-Atlantic Women's Hockey League league, with the U19 team of Bishop Kearney Selects. She gained the attention of the international ice hockey community at age fourteen with her remarkable performance at the 2023 IIHF Ice Hockey U18 Women's World Championship, which included scoring the first Michigan goal at an IIHF women's event.
Lopušanová also plays elite ball hockey and is a member of the Slovak women's national ball hockey team.
Ice hockey career
Lopušanová began figure skating on an outdoor pond at the age of two and started playing ice hockey before her fifth birthday. At the age of four, she attended a World Girls Ice Hockey Weekend hosted by the IIHF, prompting her to join a club team. She developed with MsHKM Žilina, the minor and junior affiliate of VLCI Žilina, in her hometown of Žilina.
At age thirteen, she made her senior league debut as a left winger with MsHKM Žilina ženy in the 2021–22 season of the . Though she played just six games during the season, she ranked third in the for scoring, amassing a staggering 25 goals and 15 assists for 40 points, and recorded a league-leading average of 6.67 points per game. In addition to playing with MsHKM Žilina ženy, she also played as a centre with the men's U16 team of MHK Dolný Kubín in the (renamed in 2022) during the 2021–22 season. Across three games with MHK Dolný Kubín U16, she scored a goal and 2 assists for a point-per-game pace.
In the 2022–23 campaign, she continued to build on her incredible scoring from the previous season. She ranked fifth in the and second of all MsHKM Žilina ženy players in scoring with 28 goals and 21 assists for 49 points after playing in just eight games of the 22 game season. In the final game of the session against Ice Dream Košice, she contributed to her team's landslide 24–1 win with 10 goals and 9 assists. Concurrently, she scored 18 goals and tallied 25 assists across fourteen games as a centre with VLCI Žilina U16 in the , ranking second on the team for points. Her 43 points ranked twenty-second in the , though she played five fewer games than any higher ranking player, and her 3.07 points per game ranked first in the league among players playing more than ten games.
Her stellar performance led VLCI Žilina youth coach Jakub Kubiš to dub her "a wunderkind of the kind that is born only once per century."
In April 2023, Lopušanová was announced as a finalist for the Piotr Nurowski Best Young European Athlete Prize, awarded by the European Olympic Committees. On 12 May, she won the award with over 40% of the votes. She was also named to the Forbes Slovakia 30 under 30 list in 2023.
International play
Ice hockey
Lopušanová debuted with the Slovak national under-18 team at the 2023 IIHF Ice Hockey U18 Women's World Championship in Östersund, Sweden. At just fourteen years of age, she was among the youngest players at the tournament – only seven other players were born in 2008 and three of the seven were her teammates (Lenka Karkošková, Alica Juríková, and Lívia Nogová).
In Slovakia’s first game, she scored two goals and notched an assist against Japan to lead all skaters in scoring at the conclusion of games played on the opening day of the tournament. Having grabbed international media attention in her first game, Lopušanová followed it up with "one of the most dominant performances ever seen by a player her age" in Slovakia’s game against Switzerland, scoring a hat-trick and an assist in the eventual 4–1 win. She scored a goal and notched an assist in the third game against Czechia. In the quarterfinal game against Sweden, she became the first player to score a Michigan goal at a women's IIHF event, recording Slovakia's sole goal of the game.
With nine goals and twelve points, Lopušanová was the top point producer of the tournament. In recognition of her astonishing debut, the tournament directorate selected her as Best Forward and she was named a Media All Star as well as tournament MVP by the press, despite Slovakia's sixth-place finish.
During the Friuli-Venezia Giulia 2023 edition of the European Youth Olympic Festival (EYOF), Lopušanová again led the tournament in scoring, propelling Slovakia to a silver medal.
In 2023, Lopušanová moved to the US to play with the Bishop Kearney Selects under-19 team. She impressed immediately, scoring 13 goals in the first 13 games.