Young Musicians, Athletes Know Lifelong Rewards Of Practice

Hayley Jensen, 15, was taking a break between performances.

She sat in the warm, afternoon sun on a bench outside Hughes Auditorium at Gonzaga University.

Sunning herself on a school day isn’t what got Hayley Jensen here.

She won two gold medals this week in the fiercely competitive piano competition at the 52nd annual Greater Spokane Music & Allied Arts Festival.

Now, she waited for a playoff with other gold medal winners to see who would end up on stage at the fesitval’s final concert.

“I practice the piano on the average of an hour and a half a day,” Hayley said with her braces-perfect smile.

“Sometimes it’s tough to fit it in around soccer, tennis and basketball,” said the Walla Walla High School freshman. “But that’s what my teacher says it takes if I want to succeed. And I don’t like to come all the way up here to perform and not do well.”

Here rests the secret most successful artists, athletes and high achievers in every field know: The habit of good practice lays the foundation for great success.

The discipline of practice doesn’t come naturally to most people.

Hundreds of children take piano lessons.

Only a handful won gold medals at the arts festival.

Certainly innate ability plays an important role in success at the piano or any area of human accomplishment.

If you don’t have the voice, you really shouldn’t expect to be on Broadway. If you stand 5 feet 4 inches, think computers not basketball.

But practice, practice and more practice separates those with potential from those with the gold medals.

And practice isn’t something your mother makes you do.

Back at Gonzaga, only a few feet away from Hayley Jensen, mother Kandy Gore was pacing back and forth outside the glass doors of the auditorium.

Her son, Kyle Dresback, also won a gold medal for his piano playing. His medal wasn’t won by mom.

“Kyle would never have gotten this far if I had to push him all the time to practice,” she said.

“I could force him for a while, to kind of get him over the hump, but at this point he practices on his own. It takes a lot of discipline on his part.”

For most kids and most adults the discipline needed to fit in regular practices amid the temptations of an entertainment-oriented, quick-fix society is a discipline as foreign as reading Latin.

Whether learning a language, or learning to rock climb, there are methods for practice.

Mary Toy, among the best-known and most demanding piano teachers in Spokane, even teaches classes in how to practice.

She had four students in the finals at Gonzaga. As her students began to take their places in the auditorium she talked about some of what it took for them to be there.

“It’s not just practice time,” she said. “You have to have the proper procedures, the proper tools for practicing.”

Baseball great Cal Ripken Jr. put it this way: It isn’t just practice that makes perfect, but perfect practices that make perfect.

Toy’s guide to good practice includes these tips:

Practice when your mind is alert.

Focus on the hard parts.

Play music slowly again and again until the brain has it memorized the right way.

Don’t keep running through the whole piece of music, but take segments and perfect them.

“Probably the most common mistake is that people practice without thinking or listening,” she added.

“To practice well you have to actively use your mind to think about what the composer wanted. You have to be a detective. Study the music. Find out what is there,” she explained. “Then, listen to what you are playing. Focus on what you hear.”

Practice, in other words, isn’t mindless.

It is a focused act, not to be confused with thinking about the boyfriend, or whom you want to call when practice is over.

All of which explains why so few kids who start piano end up each May waiting to play at Hughes Auditorium.

Those who do end up there leave little doubt that practice can lead to a beautiful place.

All the gold-medal winners sat quietly at first, looking down at their hands on the piano keys.

Then, the hours of repetition, exercises, focused attention, right fingering and careful listening merged in their minds and bodies and they began to play.

Words cannot capture the mastery these young people displayed.

To listen was to be awed by their accomplishments and touched by their souls and intelligence.

At young ages they already could demonstrate a lifelong talent few ever achieve in anything.

Their hours of practice had resulted in artistic accomplishments that eclipsed any benefit that might have come from more time on the phone, or in front of the TV, or simply being like most of us who won’t practice enough to make it matter.

, DataTimes