Leading forwards coach Dewald Senekal is excited to be bringing his pioneering Poker Face system to the New England Free Jacks.
Joining the two-time Major League Rugby champions for the 2025 season the innovative South African will be bringing a decade’s worth of coaching experience to Massachusetts.
Spending the majority of his post-playing career in France, where he helped Grenoble gain promotion back to the Top 14 as joint-head coach and also enjoying time with Bayonne, Stade Francais, Connacht, Oyonnax and Benetton, those years of knowledge will now contribute to the Free Jacks’ aim of completing a three-peat.
The 43-year-old is bringing a method of set-piece defence developed in top-flight European competition and proven to be highly proficient.
Poker Face
Poker Face came to Senekal in the midst of lockdown while sat on a weekly Zoom call with other leading rugby coaches from around the world.
Quickly he noticed that while coaches could talk for hours about attacking lineouts and could devise multiple ways to make that set-piece more effective, no one ever presented ways to defend it.
That is when a lightbulb lit up in Senekal’s head.
“Attacking and defensive lineouts are two things I am incredibly passionate about,” he said.
“Jonathan Thomas (ex-Wales contact area coach) did a presentation about lineout attack.
“We had a discussion about what made teams difficult to prepare against. Whether it was mirror defence, block defence or hinge defence was better.
“I started to think about how to add another dimension to that. That’s when the idea of Poker Face came into play.
“Quite often the attacking side was so clear, and the defending side wasn’t that clear. I thought let’s make it clear for everyone about the systems that exist and to know it like a dance.
“I spent as much time on my lineout defence as I did on my attack that pre-season so that we could walk into a lineout and with one word change systems for everyone to be on the same page.
“As time went on I wanted to go away from systems. Like in chess; you have your classic movements and can only do certain things.
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“With a poker mindset of counting cards, you can analyse where an opposition win the ball and what their trends are.
“On top of that you play the bluffing game, showing them a specific hand and then doing something totally different.
“Within that I started to grow this whole mentality around changing pictures for your opposition and being really difficult to prepare against with multiple systems.
“Through the way I coach it, in time, we have been able to show different pictures in one game.”
The numbers tell the story of just how effective the Poker Face system is.
Two years coaching Connacht under Andy Friend really allowed Senekal’s vision to become a reality.
In the 2021/22 season the province finished as the league’s fourth-best defenders of lineouts.
A year later they were best in class.
Honing their Poker Face and continually developing strategies, the side were a tricky proposition for whichever opponent they came up against.
Over the course of the 2022/23 season the Westerners stole a whopping 70 of the 317 lineouts that they defended.
Next closest to Connacht‘s total was that season’s eventual champions, Munster, who stole 51 lineouts over the course of that season.
Niall Murray also enjoyed a season to remember with 19 steals at the lineout.
Thriving in Senekal’s system, the young lock completed 11 more steals than the season before and nine more than Ireland international, Peter O’Mahony.
Simply put, Poker Face works.
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Time to tinker with and work out the kinks, Senekal took a concept created on a Zoom call in the depths of a global pandemic and established it in elite rugby competition.
Finding the right, jumpers, lifters, working on footwork and much more, Senekal has poured hours into perfecting lineout defence.
Now with a move to MLR and the Free Jacks in mind, there is excitement for the South African about bringing his defence system American shores.
In recent years the set-piece has ruled men’s professional rugby.
As New England wrapped up their second championship in as many years, the club turned to the lineout as a source for 36 of their 65 tries in 2024.
Acting as the source for over half of their tries, that tally is not even the highest in the competition.
On their debut run to the play-offs, the Chicago Hounds sourced 42 five-pointers from the lineout, while the now defunct Dallas Jackals crossed the whitewash 38 times thanks to their proficiency at the set-piece.
While scoring from the lineout remains a priority, the same can be said for other teams too and makes the importance of keeping opponents out all the more relevant.
“That’s the thing that gets me excited,” Senekal said.
“From what I have seen in the last two years, people are putting a lot more emphasis on their set-piece in the league and that is where the growth has been.
“Teams are starting to look for specialist props to keep their scrum in a good position, for good hookers to have an effective set-piece and give them the platform to play from.
“I am excited to see how quickly I can identify the right profiles within our New England squad that can have a role within the system.
“That system needs explosive jumpers, that are good readers, that are good lifters and team men that are there to do their job.
“For this system to work you need all the profiles.
“I believe that if I am able to implement the system really quickly, we can stress a lot of the teams within the league because of the unpredictability of the system.
“Today in modern day rugby teams run on around 80 to 85 per cent success rate.
“A lot of teams don’t put emphasis on lineout defence because they think they are going to win eight out of 10 of their lineouts anyway.
“If you do Poker Face, and do it well, you can disrupt over 40 per cent of the opposition’s ball.”
Before his move to North America, Senekal will be completing three months with Italian United Rugby Championship side Benetton.
Joining as a collision and breakdown specialist, after a season with Oyonnax Rugby came to an end, the 43-year-old has already seen some success with Poker Face.
In a pre-season match against Harlequins his charges stole eight lineouts.
Senekal joins the Free Jacks in an off-season of change for the back-to-back MLR champions.
After beating the Seattle Seawolves 20-11 to retain the Shield, it was confirmed that head coach, Scott Mathie, and forwards coach, Will Webster, were moving on to new challenges.
Ryan Martin returns to New England after spending a season as head coach in 2021, while Senekal signs on as an assistant coach alongside the incumbent Pom Simona.
With a series of returning players at their disposal, including the league’s Player of the Year, Wayne van der Bank, the team are hoping to continue building on their title-winning foundations.
Next step
Before even stepping foot in Boston the South African has been enchanted by the team thanks to watching the Proven docuseries and is hotly anticipating the next step of his coaching journey.
“Quickly I was really seduced by the things I was seeing and hearing,” Senekal said.
“You could see from the way that the coaches presented to the players and the exchanges between players, there was an environment of trust there.
“The coaches and players were opening up about personal things. Their families, themselves, their backgrounds – when I saw that it was a massive eye-opener to me and told me that this is an environment that has been created where people feel comfortable enough to do that.
“That is one thing that really stood out to me from the start. When you have got a group of people that care about what they stand for and what they want to try and achieve together, that is pretty special.
“It has been impressive to see their growth over the last few years and win two titles.
“It is the way I coach and have relationships with my players, so I felt like the fit was good from the outside looking in.”
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