Interview with PGS from Austria
Interview with Lukas Maas from PGS. The new Austrian team in the ESSL.
When was your team founded?
We played our first tournament in 2010. In 2012 we official founded the club.
In which city is your team located?
Linz, Austria. The city is located between Vienna and Salzburg.
Give us a short history of your team
PGS is the short version of “Pöstlingberg Ghetto Style”, even though we are pleasant-natured 😉 The Pöstlingberg is a 539 metres high hill in the northern area in the city of Linz. It is a popular tourist destination with a great viewing platform and the Pöstlingberg church on top of the hill. The PGS logo is a silhouette of the Pöstlingberg area.
It all started with a bunch of guys from Linz Pöstlingberg playing “BIGS” (Baseball Game on XBOX360) excessively, but nevertheless after some years it became boring. So we decided to play real life. Because we were used to the quick game flow (no long delays, more hitting, more action, etc.) of baseball on the computer, it was obvious for us to decide to play Slowpitch instead of baseball.
At the beginning there were only two people who had a clue about the game – the 2 founders of PGS: Gregor Mlczoch & Lukas Maas, but none of us had ever touched a softball before.
Fortunately we found out that there were also other teams in and around Linz. So we founded an official team and participated in the ASSL (Austrian Slowpitch League) as well as in different European Slowpitch tournaments.
In the meantime additional experienced baseball, fastpitch and Slowpitch players from other teams joined the PGS team. For the ESSL we formed a team with players from the Grizzlies, Bandits and Highlanders and some US-players joined the team.
What do you expect from this season and what are your goals?
Our main goal is to keep up with the other teams during the season, experience thrilling games, have fun, grow as a team and notice continuous progress. Hopefully we can manage to tease the one or the other big team in the league 😉
What do you think of the ESSL?
ESSL is a good instrument to promote the sport of “Slowpitch”. It also gives us the opportunity to travel around Europe and to compete with some of the best teams on our continent.
How do you see the future of the ESSL?
I think it is just the beginning of a new sports era because people just haven’t heard about Slowpitch and it’s advantages. And this is starting to change right now. Hopefully, the ESSL is able to expand. So that every country of Europe can provide a competitive team.
