Modern web application development provides an attractive application area for introductory software engineering education, as students have direct experience with the domain and it provides them with the potential to gain practical, real-world skills. Achieving this potential requires the development of competency with a multiple component tech stack for web application development, which is challenging to acquire within a single semester. In this research, we designed, implemented, and evaluated a new pedagogy called "athletic software engineering" which is intended to help students efficiently and effectively acquire competency with a multiple component tech stack as a precursor to a web application development project. We evaluated the pedagogy over 4 years and six semesters with 286 students and found strong evidence for its effectiveness.