NFL leading rusher Matt Breida married his high-school sweetheart … and teammate

A lot of guys marry their high school sweethearts. Matt Breida married his high school teammate.

Matt and Silvana Breida were members of their school’s 2011 varsity squad. The arrangement: Matt ran the ball into the end zone, Silvana delivered the extra points. In their opener, for example, she booted in all six attempts in a 42-0 win. Matt finished the season as the school’s leading scorer. Silvana was No. 2.

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“Matt would score a touchdown and as he’d be coming off the field I’d run out to kick the extra point,” Silvana recalled this week. “And we were dating throughout high school. Now it’s funny that we’re in this position.”

That position: Matt entered the 49ers’ third week as the NFL’s leading rusher, one whom everyone outside the Bay Area is just getting to know. During an interview with NFL Network this week, for example, host Andrew Siciliano poked fun at Breida’s Twitter account, which at the time had a modest 11,000 followers.

“You’re the NFL’s leading rusher!” Siciliano said with mock admonishment.

No, Breida is not prolific on social media — “I don’t do Facebook, any of that,” he said — and he’s just as quiet and reserved in real life.

That’s what Silvana liked about him when they started dating during their sophomore year at Nature Coast Technical High School north of Tampa, Fla: He was the best athlete in the school, but he didn’t act like it.

“He’s just a really good person,” she said. “It’s not too often you find guys with his talent who are not over the top about themselves, conceited. He’s just a very humble person. That’s what drew me to him.”

Matt was born in Brandon, Fla., in 1995. Two days after his delivery, he was adopted by Philadelphia natives Mike and Terri Breida, who had moved to the Tampa area after Mike contracted viral meningitis.

Years later, Terri had to leave her nursing job when severe arthritis seized her back and legs. Soon both of Matt’s parents were in wheelchairs, which helps explain why he’s so grounded.

“Once Terri stopped working, money got really tight for us,” Mike said. “He was never the type of kid who said, ‘My friend’s got $160 sneakers, I gotta have ’em, too.’ He understood. He’s still that way.”

In high school, the knock on Matt was the same as it was when he came out of Georgia Southern last season: Yes, he had speed. His nicknames were “Breida the Cheetah” and “He Gone.” But he also was small. And those around him wondered whether he could withstand the pounding that comes with being a running back.

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“He was a tiny kid as a freshman,” his high school coach, Charles Liggett, said. “But fast. I can remember — I can see it in my head — looking out during a (junior varsity) game, and he’d go to break through a hole and one of the bigger JV kids would grab him and fling him like a rag doll. And he just kept going and going.”

What his coaches soon figured out was that their tiny running back had over-sized drive and tenacity.

During his first game as a freshman, Breida suffered a broken arm but only briefly left the field. Mike and Terri, who were watching from the stands, suspected something was wrong because their son was holding his water bottle in his left hand when he normally used his right.

“The trainer from the other school came over and said, ‘Well, I think it’s just bruised,’” Liggett said. “And he taped it up and (Matt) went back out there. I don’t think he played any more that year because of the broken arm.”

The first time Silvana saw Matt he was a 9-year-old playing on her brother’s youth-league team. She was a cheerleader at the time. When they started dating in high school, she decided she wanted to be on the field, not cheering on the side of it. She mostly played on the junior varsity as a sophomore. A year later, they both were on the varsity.

“I played soccer since I was 6 years old and I always had an interest in football,” she said. “I loved football, always watched football, was around football my whole life. And I said, ‘You know what? I’m going to try and go out there and be the kicker for the guys’ team.”

Matt noted that Silvana didn’t have an instructor to show her how to kick, that she taught herself over the course of an offseason.

“All she had was her soccer experience,” he said. “So she would go out to any field she could, kick a bunch of field goals. She was playing with us. All the football workouts that we did, she did. She was getting just as strong as we were. I held the ball for her when I could, but she did a lot of it on her own, so I give her a lot of credit.”

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Not everyone was thrilled she was on the squad. There was an opposing player who decked her after a kickoff, drawing a penalty and catcalls from the stands in the process. Meanwhile, the handshake lines at the end of games — Nature Coast went 6-4 that season — weren’t exactly teeming with good sportsmanship.

“Every single time I would make (a kick), the guys on the other team would huff and puff and talk trash to me,” Silvana said. “And then after the game they wouldn’t even high five me. I’d go in the line and they’d swing their arm the opposite way.”

Silvana said a few of their close friends knew she and Matt were an item at the time, but many players didn’t know and there was little interaction between the two at practices. After all, the kickers did their work on a separate field.

“We acted like we didn’t know each other, basically,” Silvana said. “I didn’t go over to him, he didn’t talk to me. I focused on what I had to do. He focused on what he had to do. It was like we weren’t dating.”

She decided to hang up her shoulder pads before her senior season. She said it was clear some of the coaches didn’t want a girl on the team and she wanted to focus on soccer. Besides, she said, she accomplished her goal of being the first female varsity football player in Hernando County and paving the way for other girls to play the sport.

She didn’t have to wait long or look far for that to happen. Her younger sister, Santina, kicked for the same school five years later.

— Reported from Santa Clara

(Top photo: Michael Zagaris/San Francisco 49ers/Getty Images)