Wagrowiec

Wągrowiec is a small town in Greater Poland, and for decades its name on a scoreboard has meant one thing: handball at the OSiR Hall. MKS Nielba Wągrowiec carries the town's colours, yellow and black.

The 2008/2009 season is the one still talked about: Nielba won every one of its 22 matches in the I Liga, a perfect run that took the club into the Superliga for the first time. They stayed up long enough to finish 7th the following year, then found the top flight harder to hold on to — relegated in 2012 after losing the play-offs to Czuwaj Przemyśl, back up in 2014 after beating Piotrkowianin Piotrków Trybunalski, down again a year later. Before any of that, in 1973, the club had already won a title of its own, the Kolejarz Federation championship.

Dawid Przysiek is the name attached to the club's best individual season: a centre back who finished as the Superliga's top scorer in 2011/2012 with 170 goals, and who went on to play for the Polish national team. Bartosz Świerad took a different path, moving from playmaker on the court to coach on the bench once his playing days ended.

Matches against WKS Grunwald Poznań carry their own weight in the region, known simply as the Derby Wielkopolski. The OSiR Hall holds 3,000 people, and on derby nights that capacity has mattered.

None of it changes what the club was set up for in 1960: to give Wągrowiec a handball team of its own.