If you know Oliver Freigang you may know that outside his passion for founding qashqade and automating waterfall calculations for fund managers and investors, his other passion is for baseball! Oliver coaches at the local Challengers baseball team in Zurich and supports the U15 national team. In addition, qashqade sponsors both, the Challengers team and the U15 national team. Scroll down to learn more.
The team’s biggest highlight so far has been the U15 European Championship Qualifiers which took place in Valencia, Spain last summer. The Swiss team played against 5 other national teams which consisted of Israel, Great Britain, Spain, Turkey and Belgium with Great Britain and Spain being their biggest competitors. Despite the grueling heat, lack of shade and high level of their competitors, the team played to their best effort and came 4th place with their best games being against Belgium and Turkey. It was a great experience for both players and supporters and qashqade is proud to sponsor this motivated and ambitious team of young boys.
More information on the U-15 European Championship Qualifier.
This summer is a busy season as well, as the U15 national team have been training for the U15 Supercup 2023 in Dortmund, Germany which will be taking place from the 24.07-27.07. This is very exciting as the Supercup is an international tournament including national teams from Switzerland, Ukraine, Great Britain, Poland and two of the best local teams from Germany; the Hamburger Elb Academy and the Dortmund Wanderers. We wish them luck, lots of fun and great success!
The easiest way to keep up to date with the team is via Instagram.
We interviewed Oliver to get better insight into his experience as a baseball coach and why qashqade chose to sponsor the Swiss national baseball team.
Just to start things off, a simple question, what made you want to become a baseball coach?
The easy answer: my son. Given that baseball is a very minor sport in Switzerland parents are often also involved in the baseball community where their children play. The head coach for the team left, and since I used to play baseball myself, I was asked to fill this position so after fulfilling all the relevant Swiss training requirements, I became a coach.
What have you learnt from being a baseball coach, compared to the qashqade environment?
What I learnt most between baseball compared to qashqade is that you need a completely different approach on how to manage a team, since you deal with children aged 12-15 years compared to professional adults. In the professional world, people come to you to work and look for a job, whereas the children who come to training are not always motivated and ambitious and usually prioritize fun. This means that the way in which you need to teach and manage the team is separate since the end-goals are separate; in the case of a company, employees are given a task to complete and if not done properly, you sit down with them, however, in the case of being a coach, it is about motivation and training the players on a certain skill set, and most importantly that they enjoy and want to come back to the trainings. So, I would say it is a nice balance and a different kind of responsibility because you can’t treat them the same way you treat people in your company so you learn a completely new kind of leadership.
Are there any parallels between being a baseball coach and the CEO of a company?
In both cases you need to manage a team. Further, when facing competition, you decide what player is on the field and what position they take and that is the same for the CEO of a company; you are responsible for the performance of the business. If the performance of the team is not good, then this reflects the decisions of the coach. You can’t make a world champion if you don’t have the talent, but you can do the best possible with what you have and vice versa you can have the best players with the best talent but don’t have the strategy to make them successful as a team. This means that you need to understand all the weaknesses in your team, and how to eliminate these weaknesses and make them work efficiently. You must look at each individual and decide whether they fit into their position or not. This is identical in a coach and a CEO.
What led you to sponsor the Swiss national team?
First of all, since baseball in Switzerland does not have a lot of money, sponsorship was something they were always looking for. I thought it would be a great idea to associate the name qashqade with baseball since I like baseball as a sport but, more importantly, I think baseball fits to what we do as a company. Once you start understanding baseball and have played it yourself you realise the amount of facets and tactics behind it, it’s not only about the individual skill of the batter or the pitcher, it is about how the field is positioned and how you read the statistics of the opponents. There is a lot of strategy and analysis behind baseball, where these numbers and statistics about players and games are everything and lead to important decisions, and this ties exactly into what we are and how we work at qashqade, making it a relevant decision to sponsor baseball.
