Zwolen

Enea Orlęta Zwoleń went unbeaten to the top of I Liga Group C in the 2023/2024 season, finishing with 69 points from 24 matches and earning a place in the Turniej Mistrzów, the promotion tournament to the Liga Centralna. It capped a rapid rise: the club had reached I Liga only the previous season and marked its debut there by finishing second.

None of it would have happened without the youth work that came before it. Grzegorz Markiewicz set up UMKS Orlęta Zwoleń in 1999, and the senior club that carries the name today was registered only in April 2019, effectively formalising two decades of grassroots handball in the town. Promotion from II Liga followed within a year, in the 2019/2020 season, before the jump to I Liga around 2022/2023.

Kacper Tuszyński captains the side after coming up through that same academy and returning to Zwoleń following a spell in Warsaw, a detail that says something about how the club sees itself: a place players come back to rather than only leave. Korneliusz Małek has carried much of the scoring load, while Damian Spytek arrived with the pedigree of PGE Vive Kielce on his résumé.

Home games are played out in front of a modernised hall on Sienkiewicza Street, rebuilt in 2021 having first opened back in 1995. The fixtures that matter most locally come against MTS Lider Radom and AZS AWF Warszawa, billed as the Mazovia derby.

The club also runs a memorial tournament for Jerzy Markiewicz, tying its present to the coaching lineage that built it. What it has not yet done is turn a Group C title into a season in the Liga Centralna itself.