Jill's Journal: The best kind of match

Sometimes the best things in life happen when two people are simply matched up.

No complicated algorithm. No swiping left or right. No personality quiz required.

Just two people meeting for the first time and discovering they might have a pretty good time together.

That’s what happened last week at Brandon Valley High School during the Best Buddies match party.

Best Buddies pairs students with special needs with students from the general student population, creating friendships and opportunities for students to spend time together, laugh together and, perhaps most importantly, get to know one another beyond the labels we so often put on people.

And at Brandon Valley, they take this program seriously.

In fact, they have so much student participation that special education teacher Maggie Dady admitted something to me: “We cheat.”

In this case, cheating is a very good thing.

There were 19 Buddies matched last week with groups of Buddies at BVHS, and that’s a reflection of just how much interest there is in being part of the program.

Judging by the match party, those students weren’t there just to check a box on their high school activity list.

They were there to have fun.

There were games. There was dancing. There was plenty of laughter. And there were students meeting new people who, by the end of the evening, didn’t feel quite so new anymore.

That’s the beauty of Best Buddies.

Friendship has a funny way of ignoring the things we sometimes think should separate us.

Different abilities? Not important.

Different personalities? That can actually make a friendship more interesting.

Different interests? Well, that just gives you something new to learn about one another.

What matters is showing up, sitting beside someone, talking to them, laughing with them and inviting them onto the dance floor.

What matters is realizing that friendship doesn’t have to be complicated.

With camera in hand, I watched how these friendships brought smiles to so many. Because when you see young people opening their circles and making room for someone new, it gives you a little hope for the world outside our high school walls.

High school can be a wonderful place, but it also can be an intimidating one. There are cliques, expectations, insecurities and all those unwritten rules about who belongs where. Fortunately, Best Buddies seems to quietly toss those rules out the window.

Here, the goal is simple: Make a friend. And maybe that’s something the rest of us could use a little more of, too. We spend an awful lot of time as adults sorting people into categories — people who are like us, people who aren’t, people we know, people we don’t. Maybe we could take a lesson from a group of Brandon Valley teenagers.

Introduce yourself.

Play a game.

Dance a little.

Laugh a lot.

And give somebody a chance to become your friend.

The students at Brandon Valley High School aren’t just participating in Best Buddies.

They’re showing the rest of us what happens when we make room for one another.

And if that means Maggie Dady and her students have to “cheat” a little to make room for all those friendships?

Well, I’m perfectly OK with that kind of cheating.