Bridget Gleason, MS'26, began her journey into college athletics with an unexpected challenge—one that ultimately shaped the entrepreneur she'd become. After committing to play soccer at Bentley University, a Division II school, she arrived ambitious and ready to compete at the next level. Her freshman season looked different than she'd pictured, with limited playing time and a role on the sidelines rather than the field.
“It was a tough adjustment,” Gleason recalls. “I didn't have anyone to talk to about it at the time, and it wasn't something I expected going in.” Looking back, she sees it as a formative chapter — one that taught her something valuable: she wasn't alone. “I later learned how common experiences like mine are among athletes. That realization became part of what inspired my company.”
Rather than let the setback define her, Gleason turned it into fuel. She trained relentlessly through the following spring and summer, determined to grow. The payoff was extraordinary: by her junior year, under a new coach, she started every game, was named Bentley's Offensive Player of the Year, and earned First Team All New England honors. She capped her Bentley career with an NCAA tournament appearance, then went on to play Division I soccer at Northeastern while completing her master's degree — a remarkable athletic comeback by any measure.
During that fifth year, while studying for a consulting interview, inspiration struck. While browsing a site where people share honest employer reviews, she had a lightbulb moment: “Why does this not exist for college sports?” she remembers thinking. “If athletes and families could access real insight before committing to a school, they could make more informed, confident decisions.”
That spark became Inside Athletics, a platform designed to give athletes and families empowering, first-hand insight into the college sports experience. While building it through Northeastern's IDEA Venture Accelerator, Gleason interviewed roughly 40 college athletes, youth athletes, and parents — and found overwhelming enthusiasm for the idea. “Every single person I talked to said they would have wanted a platform like this,” she says.
Gleason credits D'Amore-McKim with helping turn her vision into reality. Originally in Northeastern's MS in Quantitative Finance program with Goldman Sachs internships on her resume, she pivoted into the MS in Management with a concentration in Entrepreneurship—a decision that gave her the infrastructure to build something lasting. Through Generate, Northeastern's student-led product development studio, a software team helped bring Inside Athletics' first MVP to life. Driven and resourceful, she then taught herself AI coding to keep building the platform on her own.
That entrepreneurial spirit recently earned her a spot among Northeastern's 2026 Women Who Empower Innovator Award recipients, celebrating standout student founders building meaningful companies out of Northeastern's classrooms and accelerators.
For Gleason, the mission is bigger than one platform. “AI has been enormously helpful to me, and most startups today are AI native and AI driven,” she says. “But the one thing AI will never replace is human connection — and that's exactly what my platform is built on.” That same philosophy fuels Duality Social Club, an event brand she co-founded in Boston and Miami, and her Substack, Freedom-First Ambition, and Instagram, itsbridgetgleason, where she shares weekly updates on her entrepreneurial journey.
Whether she's talking to athletes, founders, or her growing online community, Gleason's message stays consistent: “Tell the truth, build community, and be transparent about the parts nobody posts. That's the through line in everything I do.”
