As someone who straddles the athletic and intellectual fences, I would like to dispel the idea that athletic achievement = coasting for the physically gifted. For anyone who has true professional/Olympic caliber athletic ability, training and nutrition regimens match ability early. These children are being given the athletic equivalent of multiple grade skips and curriculum compacting early in their athletic "careers". This may seem like an extreme example, but statistically it's analogous to the 99%ile+ children represented here. Even for kids who are "just" strong high school players, there is a lot of discipline and effort required to use those innate abilities.
But we're not talking about Olympic athletes here, we're talking about high school athletes. Big fish, little pond. Coasting by on natural abilities will get you by in high school. That's true of athletics and academics. When you start talking about Olympic athletes, the academic corrolary is Nobel laureates, and the idea of coasting on abilities will no longer work in either case.
I would argue the best way to validate intellectual giftedness publicly is to adopt the athletics model and actually meet children at their level and keep pace with them through their studies.
As an aside, I wonder how many parents of gifted athletes feel that their children aren't properly challenged in public school athletics programs, and feel compelled to after-school/homeschool/enrich that? It seems to me that every time I hear about an athlete who has been successful at the highest levels, outside activity has been a major part of their lives. Maybe the parents of gifted athletes have more in common with us than we realize.
I think I understand the spirit of your post, and I may be mistaken, but I don't think you meant to analogize giftedness to club membership. To simply equate a different way of thinking, feeling, and existing as being in Club Gifted downplays the different learning needs arising from the gifted's fundamentally different gestalt.
Maybe I've got it all wrong, but I don't see much difference between being a member of the X club or being a member of Mr. Y's 4th-period English class. It's all about kids coming together and sharing a common experience.
Now, you could say that Mr. Y's 4th-period English class does not get separate treatment in the yearbook, but the marching band does, and that could just as easily be described as Mrs. Z's 5th-period music class.
