Midweek Milestones: Standout Stats from Week 6 of the 2026 MLR Season!
In what feels like the blink of an eye, the midway point of the 2026 Major League Rugby season has been and gone! With only 10 games per team, there hasn't been much room for errors so far this year, and as we enter the final 5-game stretch, it's crunch time
Welcome back to Midweek Milestones, the weekly article that gets into the numbers from the latest Week of MLR action and pulls out the extreme, the unusual, and the standout stats! Even though Week 6 only had a pair of matches, the numbers from these 2 games threw up quite a lot of interesting stuff, so let's get into it!
Appearance Achievements
As usual, we kick things off with the Appearance Achievements, and there's just the one this week but for the second time in 2026, it concerns Major League Rugby veteran and Chicago Hounds forward Luke White!
A few weeks ago, Luke White became the 6th player in MLR history to reach 100 appearances in the competiti,on. Coming off the bench again in Week 6 during their hard-fought victory over Old Glory DC, White became just the 2nd player to reach 50 appearances for the Chicago Hounds! White follows Maclean Jones into Chicago's half-century club. Congratulations!
Link to Chicago Hounds IG post for Luke White’s 50th
Seawolves earn 73rd win!
The Seattle Seawolves got their season off to a flying start with a home victory over Old Glory DC back in Week 2, which marked the 72nd victory in team history to tie with long-time rivals the San Diego Legion with the most wins in Major League Rugby History!
As impressive an achievement as this is, you may be forgiven for beginning to think it was more of a curse. The Seawolves have been struggling with injuries all season, and went on a 3-game losing streak after earning their 72nd win. That changed last weekend, however, as they put in a clinical performance to claim a bonus-point victory over the New England Free Jacks at the formidable Fort Quincy! The 11-27 victory is the 73rd in Seawolves history, putting them ahead of the San Diego Legion as the team with the most wins in MLR history!
As the only remaining founding member of Major League Rugby, the Seattle Seawolves have played more games than any other team, recording their 73 victories in 127 games for a win rate of 57.48% and combining 64 wins in 114 regular season games (56.14%) with a remarkable 9 wins from 13 post-season matches (69.23%) that includes four visits to the MLR Championship Game, lifting the Shield twice! Congratulations, Seawolves!
Their opponents on Sunday, the New England Free Jacks, are really not far behind, however, with 69 wins in their 99 MLR games since joining in 2020 (2 seasons after Seattle!), with an incredible win rate of 69.7% across all games. They are 4 wins behind Seattle with at least 5 games left in 2026. It's a tough ask, but I would never count them out.
Scoring Milestones
As mentioned, there were quite a few standout stats in Week 6, considering there were only a pair of matches, and most of them relate to scoring milestones, so let's get stuck in, and while we're talking about the Seattle Seawolves, let's start there!
There was a bit of a twist ending to the Seawolves' road victory over the Free Jacks. Seattle managed to secure the try bonus point with their 4th try of the game right at the death through Tiai Vavao's first pro try, and with the clock in the red and the game already won, who should step up to take the conversion but long-time Seawolves captain, Riekert Hattingh. I know Seattle has had some injury trouble but I didn't expect the big back row to be lining up a shot at goal, and he absolutely smashed it!
Having channeled his inner John Eales, Hattingh becomes the first forward in MLR history to score a conversion kick, and those 2pts actually took his career total to an even 250pts scored in the competition, joining his 46 - yes, FORTY-SIX - tries and 3 automatic conversions for tries under the posts (which is no longer a rule in 2026). This puts Hattingh 15th on MLR's all-time scoring list, and I expect we'll be talking about him again in next week's Midweek Milestones, because he's sat on 999 tackles made. Congratulations, Riekert!
Moving over to the other game of Week 6, where we saw another pair of scoring milestones in a very hard-fought Chicago Hounds victory, with Old Glory DC giving them probably their toughest test of the season to date. The 49-31 scoreline isn't particularly reflective of just how much of a war this game was, and both fly-halves stood out!
Starting with the home side, I mentioned in last week's Midweek Milestones article that I expected Chris Hilsenbeck's success rate from the tee to bounce back, and it certainly did in this one! The USA Eagle slotted 4 conversions and 3 penalties, going 7/8 (87.5%) from the tee and racking up 17pts scored to absolutely breeze past both 150pts in his MLR career (thanks to 11pts scored for Rugby ATL in 2023) and 150pts for the Chicago Hounds, reaching 165pts in his 24-game MLR career so far, and we aren't done there! Hilsenbeck's 17 points scored ties a single-game Chicago Hounds record, matching Nate Augspurger's total from a hat trick (and 1 auto-conversion) back in 2024. Congratulations, Chris!
Not to be outdone, Hilsenbeck's opposite number over on the Old Glory DC side, Jason Robertson, also put in a brilliant performance and didn't just let his place-kicking do the talking! Robertson dotted down in both the first 10 minutes and the last 10 minutes to bag a brace for Old Glory, adding another 4pts off the tee from a pair of conversions for 14pts in total! This takes Robertson's total up to 412pts scored in his MLR career, becoming the 5th player in League history to pass 400pts scored, and leapfrogging Seattle's Davy Coetzer (410) for 4th place all-time! In the first Midweek Milestones article of the season I highlighted Coetzer and Robertson as they moved into the Top 5 and mentioned that their scoring battle could be one to watch throughout the 2026 campaign, and it's just as close now as it was then!
Standout Stats
Flying around the league to give a shoutout to another player that hit a big milestone this week that isn't quite as flashy as scoring points, test-capped Canadian hooker Dewald Kotze recorded more tackles than any other Seawolves player in their road win in New England, completing 15 in total to take his career total over 500! The South African-born Canadian now sits on 510 tackles in 56 MLR games (41 starts), averaging 9.1 tackles per game. Not shabby at all for a front row. Congratulations, Dewy!
Wrapping Up
A club half-century, a Major League Rugby first, and a bunch of big scoring milestones from just the two games in Week 6 of MLR's 2026 campaign. With teams bringing in reinforcements for their playoff pushes, and no room for any slip-ups in the remaining 5 games of the regular season, the action is only going to heat up! Make sure you come back next week to check out all the Midweek Milestones from Week 7 of the 2026 MLR Season!
Thank you for reading this week’s edition of Midweek Milestones! I hope you enjoy reading these articles as much as I enjoy writing them, and find them interesting and engaging. Please feel free to let me know what you thought of this article on social media, or if you’ve found a milestone that I may have missed!
James Deeley: MLR Legacy creator to see more of his work, click here.