177 teams, 98 individual players, matches held in 5 cities with the final in Katowice Spodek. All this under the auspices of Plus and Professional Volleyball League. Volup could not have missed it!

"Amateur Plus League is the first amateur nation-wide volleyball competition. Elimination and league matches will take place in Warsaw, Poznań, Wejherowo, Katowice and Wrocław." Such a description can be found on the Plus League website. The scale, breadth, professionalism and the information about trainings with professional volleyball players as well as distant (yet possible) vision of the final matches in Katowice Spodek made us sign up in the last moment.

The first obstacle appeared even before the first match, as the organizers published the schedule of the matches only 1.5 days before the first game. That's why the first task was to gather everyone at the gym at 9.30 am on Sunday. We have already got used to the fact that there are 2 players on the team from outside of Warsaw, who travel to our matches. This time it was a bit more difficult, as Jarek was (as usual) in Orzechowo, Tomek in Sopot, Jacek in Bydgoszcz and Mikołaj in Radzyń Podlaski... Luckily, except for Mikolaj, all the others managed to reach the destination on time, which was really something.

At the place, it turned out that our first rivals, amateur champion of Łowicz and Skierniewice, Coal Skierniewice, didn't turn up. This way we won the first match by a walkover. In order to benefit from being already up on such an inhuman time on Sunday, we decided to play a friendly match against Leśny Dzbanek as their opponents didn't show up either. 2 sets played on 50% won to 23 were a good warm-up before the actual matches.

As the next game was schedules at 2 pm, some of us (read. Jacek and Łukasz M.) gather their belongings and set off to their homes. A few seconds later the referees offers us to play the next match straight away, so we started calling them back. As it later turned out, they put their bags, including mobile phones, into the trunk and received our calls upon reaching their homes. So after 45 min. of waiting they showed up again in the gym and we could play the 2nd match. It was a very easy victory against D-skład, which was probably built of individual players, and finished within an "hour with shower" (-8, -14) or even faster.

So the time has come to play the decisive match for the qualification. As it happens, it turned out that we were to play... Leśny Dzbanek, with whom we had a friendly game in the morning. We walked on court very motivated as the qualification was within our grasps. We won the first set very easily to 9, playing very well. In the second part, we managed to build up and advantage until 16:12 when our game suddenly broke down. We lost 4 points in a row and the tension was growing. Luckily, we managed to keep up our focus and pin down the victory. Even though nobody could have had any doubts about which team was better, the result (25:9, 25:17) doesn't fully reflect what was happening on court. Our rivals showed very good defense, which made the rallies very long. But we played a good match too and our supremacy was indisputable.

This way we qualified to Amateur Plus League. More information can be found on the website here.