Brehme and Fornal – two of Jastrzebski Wegiel’s jewels

Poland’s JSW Jastrzebski Wegiel Jastrzebie-Zdroj is one of the four teams that reached the semifinals of the CEV Champions League and are set to compete at the 2025 Final Four event in Lodz, Poland taking place next week, from May 16 to 18. Today we present to you two of Jastrzebski Wegiel’s stars - Anton Brehme and Tomasz Fornal.

Tomasz Fornal is a 27-year-old Polish outside hitter, one of Jastrzebski Wegiel’s emblematic leaders. The 2.00m-tall athlete has been competing for the club from Jastrzebie-Zdroj since 2019 and is about to complete his sixth season with the team. It has been a very successful period in his professional club career. During that time, they reached two Champions League finals – in 2023 and in 2024 – and this is will be the overall fourth time they play in the semifinals, after also reaching that stage in 2022.

They have also triumphed as Polish champions three times, as national cup winners once and as national super cup winners twice, among making a number of other podiums in major domestic competitions. Fornal has collected a number of Most Valuable Player (MVP) and other individual awards in the process, most recently in last month’s Poland Cup triumph.

After starting to play volleyball as a schoolboy in his native Krakow and later joined the youth section of PGE Skra Belchatow, Tomasz started his professional club career in 2016, when he made his PlusLiga debut as a player of Cerrad Czarni Radom. He was part of that club for three seasons, before transferring to Jastrzebski Wegiel.

Meanwhile, young Fornal emerged as an important member of Poland’s age-category national teams and piled up an impressive collection of international accolades, including several world and continental titles at the 2015 CEV U19 European Championship, the 2015 European Youth Olympic Festival, the 2015 FIVB U19 World Championship, the 2016 CEV U20 European Championship and the 2017 FIVB U21 World Championship.

He continued his success in the Polish senior men’s national team, which he joined in 2019. Since then, Fornal and his Polish teammates have collected: a EuroVolley 2023 crown and a EuroVolley 2021 bronze, a Paris 2024 Olympic silver, a 2022 FIVB World Championship silver, a 2019 FIVB World Cup silver, and five Volleyball Nations League medals, including a 2023 gold. He was also named on the Dream Team of VNL 2024.

Anton Brehme is a 25-year-old German middle blocker, towering at a height of 2.06m. He is in his second season competing abroad and his very first season with Jastrzebski Wegiel and in Poland as a whole. He has already picked up his first trophy with the club from Jastrzebie-Zdroj, the 2025 Poland Cup, and is hoping to add an even more important second crown from the Champions League next week. In the team’s crucial game for Final Four qualification, their second-leg quarterfinal against Greece’s Olympiacos Piraeus, Brehme’s contribution was recognized with the MVP award.

In his first professional club venture outside Germany, Brehme played in the Italian SuperLega as a member of Valsa Group Modena’s stellar squad.

Before that, the talented middle had a really successful period in the German Bundesliga. As member of Berlin Recycling Volleys, he earned four national championship crowns, one national cup and three national super cup trophies. Brehme also played for German clubs SVG Lueneburg and Olympia 93 Berlin.

Anton Brehme has been a member of the German national team since 2017, when he was only 17 years old. His national team journey so far has been highlighted by their qualification to the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, where they took sixth place.