Sparta Jarocin

Sparta Jarocin's most recent line in the record books reads like the closing of a loop: in the 2025/2026 season the club won the I Liga and returned to the Ekstraliga, the same route it had already travelled once before, in 2020. Between those two promotions sits most of the club's competitive life, and both times the route back to the top flight ran through the same second-tier grind.

The club did not start as Sparta at all. A group in Jarocin held its first training session on 23 June 2007 under the name Klub Rugby Jarocin, and only the following year, on 10 November 2008, did the side formally register as Rugby Klub Sparta Jarocin. The early years belonged to sevens rather than the fifteen-a-side game: the club took the Polska Liga Rugby 7 title in 2010 and then won the Wielkopolska sevens championship in both 2012 and 2013, building a regional reputation before it had established itself at the top of the domestic league system.

Jarocin's rugby side plays in green and black and answers to Spartanie among its own supporters. Fixtures against KS Posnania Poznań carry the weight of the Derby Wielkopolski, the province's own name for a local rivalry that means more to both towns than a routine league date.

Błażej Kalinowski runs the club from the middle of it rather than above it, combining the roles of president, head coach and player, while academy graduates such as Maciej Żarczyński, who captained Poland's under-18 side before moving on to Arka Gdynia, have carried the Jarocin badge into the national age-group setup. It is a small-town production line that keeps feeding a club still measured against the same test it set itself back in 2007: getting a rugby team out of Jarocin and keeping it in Poland's top division.