Handball team

AZS AWF Warszawa Women

Club · Poland · I Liga Women

«Akademiczki»

104 Matches

39 wins

65 losses

2782–3162 Goals

−380 Difference

26.8 Scored per game

Form L W L W W L

Long before the club had a handball section, the Academy of Physical Education in Warsaw needed a sports club for its own students, and in November 1949 it got one — the first academic sports club anywhere in Poland. The women who took up handball there did so within a few years of that founding, and they did it in the eleven-a-side game that has since disappeared from the sport.

They were good at it immediately. In 1953, against eleven other teams, AZS AWF Warszawa took the first Polish women's championship in the discipline, and the squad supplied much of the country's first national team that same year — the goalkeeper Alfreda Ograbek among them, and Romualda Gruszczyńska, who scored the first goal the Polish women's side ever recorded internationally.

Between that title and the present sits a long stretch that has not always been kind to the club. The team has moved between Poland's top flight and the lower divisions, and in 2023 the section was reported to be close to folding for lack of funding from the city, playing on afterwards in the I Liga and then the Liga Centralna. What has kept the name current is the academic circuit rather than the professional one: in 2024 the Akademiczki won the Academic Championships of Poland, beating AZS UW Warszawa in the final, and took the beach handball title the same year. A handful of players have gone further — Anna Maria Gryc into senior international selection, Zofia Floriańczyk into the under-17 beach handball side.

None of that carries the weight, locally, of the fixture against Warszawianka. It is billed as the Derby of the Capital, and for a club whose glory dates to a format nobody plays any more, it remains the one match where the history still feels present.

Latest results

Fixtures and results

18 Oct	I Liga Women	JKS Jaroslaw Women A	23:29	L
4 Oct	I Liga Women	SMS ZPRP Lublin Women A	32:31	W
27 Sep	I Liga Women	AZS UMCS Lublin Women H	35:25	W
19 Sep	I Liga Women	Agrykola Warszawa Women A	17:25	L
20 Apr	I Liga Women	Rzeszow Women H	23:18	W
15 Apr	I Liga Women	AZS UMCS Lublin Women H	23:28	L