Student-athlete Allison Tanner pursues MBA and more after injuries derail high jumping career

A motivated student and talented high jumper, Allison Tanner sustained an injury early in her Auburn track & field career that required surgery, but rather than be discouraged by the setback, she took advantage of the additional year of eligibility to pursue an advanced degree.

“I had taken a red-shirt medical year, and I knew I still had some [athletic] eligibility, so I decided to graduate in three years,” said Tanner, who earned her bachelor’s degree in communications in 2023 and was named to the Auburn Tigers athletics academic honor roll. “I could then spend two years getting my master’s, and I could compete all the way through for a full five years.”

Her dream, she said, was to eventually launch a career in university development and scholarship fundraising, so she decided to earn an MBA in the Harbert College of Business.

“I felt like I had the people and communication skills, but I was lacking an understanding of how finance and business work,” said Tanner, who enrolled in the MBA program in the summer of 2023.

The best laid plans, though, sometimes don’t pan out.

In her quest to return to the team, Tanner said, she overtrained, which resulted in a second injury that required surgery. Her high jump career was over.

Her academic pursuits, though, were just about to take off.

Tanner joined forces with two Auburn mechanical engineering graduate students and former track & field athletes—David Hollinger and David Edmondson—who were developing an affordable and accessible app to help young athletes train better and avoid injury.

The trio formed The Digital Athlete to try and commercialize their technology, and in the spring of 2024, they made the semi-final round of the Harbert College Tiger Cage Business Idea Pitch competition, an annual event that supports innovative early-stage products or services created by Auburn students.

“Both David Edmondson and I ended up having career-ending injuries that came from overuse and a lack of understanding our body’s biomechanics,” Tanner said. “The whole point of The Digital Athlete was to keep other athletes from having the experience that we had.”

The Digital Athlete is a smartphone platform that uses AI to provide quick, affordable human motion analysis. Essentially, athletes video record themselves running and the platform assesses their biomechanical movement, making recommendations on how to avoid injury and even suggesting which running shoes might work best for their gait.

Later in the spring, the team applied to participate in SEC Startup, a “Shark Tank-style” business pitch competition for student-athletes sponsored by the Southeastern Conference (SEC). Although they initially didn’t make the cut, Tanner said, their fortunes changed unexpectedly just before the competition.

“Forty-eight hours before they filmed the competition in June, the academic commissioner at the SEC called us and said, ‘one of the five teams had to drop out,’” said Tanner, noting that those teams had been preparing for a month or more to prepare their pitch.

Since SEC Startup was being filmed in Birmingham, Hollinger and Edmondson met up with Tanner at her workplace less than 48 hours before the competition, where they were joined by Jennifer Nay, an entrepreneur-in-residence at Auburn’s New Venture Accelerator (NVA). Nay provided some strategic coaching and guidance as the team updated and improved the pitch they’d made at Auburn’s Tiger Cage competition months earlier.  

The next day, as the cameras rolled, Tanner pitched The Digital Athlete and she and her teammates fielded the judges’ follow-up questions. Nay knew right away that they’d done something special.

“The second they finished, I knew they’d won it,” Nay recalled. “I think the guys were in disbelief because they had just put it all together yesterday. I saw that entrepreneurship flare in Allison.”

SEC Startup judge Daymeon Fishback, who is a game analyst on the SEC Network, praised Tanner and her colleagues

“Your presentation was fantastic…and you worked cohesively as a team,” said Fishback, an Auburn alumnus and former basketball star. “More importantly than that was your why. You’ll go back to your why as you work on the business. You’ll think about the injuries you had. You’ll think about helping others be successful like yourselves through your vision of this product.”

The Digital Athlete received $10,000 from event sponsor Regions Bank for placing first, and Tanner said the team will use the money to continue developing the platform into a subscription-based app for high school and college-level athletic programs and athletes playing a variety of sports.

Tanner anticipates graduating with her MBA in December and aims to find a full-time job working in development or marketing. In the meantime, she expressed gratitude for the support Harbert and the NVA have provided her—from the Tiger Cage and SEC Startup competitions to an international business course trip to Australia and a case competition experience with the MBA program.

“Harbert [College] has given me tons of opportunities,” she said. “The Graduate Career Services team has given me a lot of feedback on my presentation skills. NVA and Jennifer Nay have been great. Jennifer was a hero, helping us pull together a pitch within 48 hours and traveling to Birmingham last minute. I’m just very thankful for the Harbert College of Business, in general.”