Ashley Xu

Who received this grant?

Ashley is a 17-year-old professional table tennis player. He knows the shape of an athlete's life from the inside: the early mornings, the ranking points, the years of training that organise everything else around them. 

What he could not find was a map for what comes after. Nobody had told him what a high school athlete is meant to do when the sport stops, or slows, or simply ends earlier than expected.

The question stayed with him long enough that he decided to answer it for everyone coming behind him. He is building Stulete, a sport-to-life pathways platform that gives every high school athlete a clear plan for what comes next, and the sense of closure that is so hard to find when a sporting chapter ends before you are ready.

What was this grant used for?

Ashley won the 2026 Future Accelerator and received a microgrant to turn the idea into a real business. He wanted to build a software platform that schools could use to manage all their student athletes in one place, covering fifteen sports, each with its own tailored pathway. This included features such as:

• A personal record holding every achievement in one place
• An individualised roadmap for each athlete
• Suggested training and next steps
• Coach bookings
• A library of resources and reading

WHAT THE $500 BOUGHT (itemised by Ashley)
Business registration and ABN
Development software
Domain and hosting
Total — $500

What has the grant achieved in 3 months?

Within weeks of the money landing, Ashley had registered and incorporated the business, so Stulete stopped being an idea he talked about and became something that could sign agreements with schools.

Ashley built the software platform next. Schools can now sign up and onboard their student athletes into one system, which is the difference between a tool that helps one athlete and something a whole cohort runs on. Everything he promised in his application is live, including a personal record that holds an athlete's achievements in one place, a roadmap that tells them what to do next, suggested training, coach bookings and a library of resources. He has built it out across fifteen sports, each with its own pathway.

Alongside the product, he has founded a student athlete community and started a club at his own school to run it, with five of his peers joining the committee. Coaches are coming on board as well, starting with the table tennis network he knows best. It means that when Ashley finishes school, the club will not finish with him.

Before the end of the year he will run his first Athlete Forum, bringing fifty students together from schools across Victoria with Olympians invited to tell them how they answered the same question he started with. That is fifty young athletes given a map, from a grant that began with one who could not find one.

How it happened

What does he need next?

Ashley is looking for schools to collaborate on the Athlete Forum in December, and for Olympians and coaches willing to come and speak on the day. The Forum works best when the room holds athletes from across Victoria and the people in front of them have already walked the path those students are about to take.