ZPRP Kielce

Every spring since 2022, the SMS Cup final has come down to the same two academies, and SMS ZPRP Kielce has walked away with the trophy each time — four finals against SMS ZPRP Kwidzyn, four wins, the last coming in 2025. That run has become the club's defining measure, more than anything it has done in the Liga Centralna or the Polish Cup, where results have stayed modest.

The academy grew out of the Polish Handball Association's network of sports schools, opening its doors in September 2017 as a boarding programme built to feed players toward the senior game rather than to chase results itself. It shares the city with Industria Kielce, one of European handball's heavyweight clubs, but operates as a separate institution under the association's own banner, training at Hala Legionów, a 4,200-capacity arena the youth side uses alongside other tenants.

Mariusz Jurasik, once a mainstay of the Polish national team, has led the coaching staff, and the academy's output has started to show through: Piotr Mielczarski earned a call-up to the senior national team in 2023, while Jakub Trzaskowski has already agreed a move to Wybrzeże Gdańsk to take effect in 2026. Neither achievement came with fanfare — the point of the school is to produce exactly this kind of transition, quietly, one player at a time.

Beyond Kwidzyn, there is a looser rivalry with SMS ZPRP Płock, borrowed almost wholesale from the senior game, where Kielce and Płock have long met in the fixture known as the Holy War. At youth level it carries less weight than the Kwidzyn final, but it keeps alive the sense that whatever happens at Hala Legionów echoes what happens on the senior stage across town.