Abstract - Sport clubs in school environment in Poland
In school environment in Poland there are two kinds of clubs, which are different regarding their traditions: school clubs and student clubs. The first of them started their activity in the 1950s within structures of the School Sports Union, the second did it almost 40 years later as associations which are not registered by courts of law but which are entered into registers kept by county officials. Student sports clubs, in spite of the fact that they have come into existence only recently, are characterized by an unparalleled dynamics of quantitative growth. As early as in 2006 their number exceeded 6.8 thousand, while the number of school sports clubs has been declining systematically for more than a dozen years (from 313 in 1998 to 106 in 2010).
In order to get opinions about functioning of those clubs, a written survey was conducted among 100 PE teachers, participants of the Postgraduate Management Studies of Physical Culture Organization and Management, which were taking place as a part of the National Programme of Sports Staff Education in P. Włodkowic Higher School in Płock, the Higher School of Education and Tourism in Białystok and in the Academy of Physical Education in Warsaw in 2011.
Not all of the respondents worked at schools with functioning student and school sports clubs and that is why only 30 questionnaires were finally processed. The researched expressed their opinions about: 1) the place of student sports clubs and school sports clubs in the process of physical education, 2) functions performed by those clubs, 3) changes which could facilitate the process of outof-school physical education.
An analysis of the answers gives an interesting picture of the researched issue, but it was only a survey which signalled definite problems and a wider scale research is needed.