This grad explains the inspiration behind her award-winning tech venture
Bridget Gleason took first place in the Future of Work category for Northeastern’s Women Who Empower Innovator Awards 2026
Bridget Gleason started playing soccer when she was in first grade. Initially just kicking a ball around her hometown of Sandwich, Massachusetts, she soon developed into a promising athlete.
“Growing up, I mostly watched the U.S. women’s national [soccer] team, and like so many young girls who play, they were my idols,” Gleason, a Northeastern masters graduate, told Northeastern Global News. “I’ve since met many of them. They showed me what’s possible in women’s sports.”
At 18, Gleason committed to play soccer at Bentley University, a private university and Division II school in Waltham, Massachusetts. However, her freshman season wasn’t how she’d hoped, with limited playing time and a role mainly on the bench.
Five days into preseason, her coach told her she wouldn’t play in a single game for the entire season. This made Gleason even more determined. She trained relentlessly through the following spring and summer. By her junior year, under a new coach, she started every game, became the top goalscorer and was named Bentley’s Offensive Player of the Year.
In the fall of 2025, Gleason started to play Division I soccer at Northeastern University while pursuing her master’s in management at the D’Amore-McKim School of Business on the school’s Boston campus.
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Gleason was part of the Northeastern Huskies 2025 Women’s Soccer Roster where she played as both a forward and a defender, a fairly unusual combination, according to Gleason.
It was during her one-year program at Northeastern that she started working on what would become her award-winning venture. While browsing a site where people share honest employer reviews, she pondered why this type of opportunity to share feedback doesn’t exist for college sports.
She set out to put that right by creating Inside Athletics, a free online platform connecting verified college athletes with youth athletes and parents to share firsthand experiences of what’s happening behind locker room doors.
While building the review portal through Northeastern’s IDEA Venture Accelerator, a student-led venture that turns concepts into fully-fledged businesses, Gleason interviewed about 40 college athletes, youth athletes and parents – and found overwhelming enthusiasm for the idea.
“In high school, you don’t really understand what being a college athlete is like until you’re living it,” she said. “Nearly every athlete I’ve talked to faced challenges in college they never saw coming in high school. Topics like mental health, injuries, playing time, and life after sports still feel taboo to talk about. They shouldn’t be.”
Through Generate, Northeastern’s student-led product development studio, a software team helped bring Inside Athletics to life. Gleason even taught herself AI coding – with no engineering background – to keep building the platform on her own.
“ChatGPT came out halfway through my college career, and there were no classes on AI coding,” she said. “I taught myself through research and trial and error. As someone comfortable with technology, it wasn’t that hard. It just takes a willingness to learn.”
Whether a current or former college athlete, a student or a parent, users can go to joininsideathletics.com to create a free account – either anonymously or under a name. They can then read people’s stories, share their own experiences and ask or answer questions. For example, a young athlete may search for a college and ask about the “typical resources offered to student athletes” in order to get inside knowledge from a former student.
This summer, Northeastern University announced the 34 winners of the 2026 Women Who Empower Innovator Awards, graduates who are honored for ventures across AI, technology, arts, entrepreneurship, health and social change.
Gleason took first place in the Future of Work category for Inside Athletics, which finally gives college athletes a place to “speak openly about what they’re going through,” she said.
She cited her overall goal for Inside Athletics as being to reach as many athletes, youth athletes and parents as possible.
Gleason’s former tutor, Stephanie Adams, assistant director for MS in Management and Graduate Certificates at D’Amore-McKim, described her one-time student as “professional, very motivated and great to work with”.
“Bridget clearly has put a lot of work into Inside Athletics and seems to have a clear goal in mind for the platform,” Adams told NGN. “I also think it’s a great way to give student-athletes and their families more information so they can make more informed decisions.”
Gleason also co-founded Duality Social Club, an events brand launched in Boston and Miami for Gen Z-ers who want to blend nightlife and wellness activities.
She runs a YouTube channel and TikTok account called “The Freedom Experiment”, where she shares regular updates on her entrepreneurial journey.
“It can be so isolating being an entrepreneur because you feel like literally no-one sees what you see,” she said. “But we just have to see it through, because we just see it early. Everyone else will see it later.”
