Like Mia, I'm really looking forward to this conversation; please don't hide it away in PMs if at all possible! With questions' intuitions and Kriston's questions, I think we could make some really good progress.
Let me take a crack at Kriston's first set of questions:
What is your goal here? What do you want to accomplish and why?
I can imagine two different types of goal. The first is to change the image of smart kids - or smartness in general. There is a long tradition of accusations of anti-intellectualism in American culture (Richard Hofstadter's book "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life" is a locus classicus), and whether these accusations are ultimately supportable or not there's certainly a reason they occur so regularly. What this anti-intellectualism is precisely, whether it takes a peculiar form in American culture, and what if anything should be done about it are all hard questions. But at any rate it seems clear that an analogous accusation of anti-athleticism in American culture would seem ludicrous on the face of it. Exploring this contrast might be interesting. The hope would be to begin a conversation that brings the stereotype of the smart kid under attack.
A second possible goal is more concrete. Get the Gates Foundation to lobby for federal legislative reforms that require public schools to treat gifted education on the model of special education. I assume that this is something that Davidson is already committed to, maybe even focused on, but the money and prestige of the Gates Foundation could bring a lot of attention to the issue. This goal is only tangential to the discussion of academics and sports, but if we are storming the Gates then it seems like a reasonable issue to focus on.
I'm just throwing ideas around here, in the spirit of brainstorming. But I think this is a truly exciting area to be thinking about.
BB