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.
qashqade has continued to support Baseball in Switzerland.
As part of our sponsoring, we are working together with the Zurich Challengers NLB and youth teams and have also started a travel team for U16 players called the Swiss Wolverines. This travel team, which comprises of Swiss national team players and Swiss residents, has participated in the Catalunya baseball week back in spring 2025 and will be competing again in the Catalunya baseball week in October 2025 against strong international teams from the UK, Spain, Italy, and Germany. The goal of this travel team is to increase the level of baseball in Switzerland among the players and allow Swiss players to play against strong international teams and to compete on a higher level. qashqade is dedicated to support young players and will do so in the coming years as well.
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.
