Poland Women

Serbia and Turkey are the names that get circled on the schedule before anything else does: no derby title attaches to either fixture, and Italy sits close behind as the third team whose results tend to decide where a tournament goes.

Poland's women first took the court on 14 February 1948, beating Czechoslovakia 3:1 in Warsaw, and the federation still calls the side by the same pairing of colours it wore that day — white and red, shortened by supporters to Biało-Czerwone. The record built since then leans toward silver and bronze rather than gold: two Olympic bronzes, from Tokyo in 1964 and Mexico City in 1968, plus a world championship final lost in 1952 and two more bronzes at that event in the following decade. The gold medals came later and closer together, back-to-back European titles in 2003 and 2005, a stretch that separates that generation of the team from the ones on either side of it.

Joanna Wołosz has captained and set for the side through the more recent years, including the run to a bronze medal at the 2024 Nations League under head coach Stefano Lavarini, who took over the team in 2021. Because it is a national side rather than a club, there is no single ground to speak of — Poland's matches move between arenas such as Torwar in Warsaw, the Atlas Arena in Łódź and Ergo Arena on the Gdańsk-Sopot border, depending on where the federation schedules a given tie.

Those Serbia and Turkey fixtures keep resurfacing at the sharp end of European and world events, which is why Polish teams have come to treat neither as just another pool match.