Merrimack College Alumni Spotlight: Kate Eren ’04

Building a Strong Foundation

Kate Eren ’04 shares her unexpected journey from student-athlete to business leader.

For nearly a decade, Kate Eren played competitive tennis without giving much thought to what lay beneath her feet.

The court was simply there, ready for the next match.

Today, building those courts is her family’s business.

The irony makes her smile.

“I have been playing tennis since I was four years old,” she said. “I never really thought about how tennis courts are built. You don’t realize what’s beneath the surface.”

Looking back, Kate has come to appreciate that the same idea applies to life itself.

People often notice the finished product. They see the career or the accomplishments and recognition. What they rarely see is the foundation underneath: the relationships that shape us, the experiences that challenge us and the lessons that prepare us for opportunities we never imagined.

For Kate, much of that foundation was built at Merrimack College.

Today she has been recognized by the Hartford Business Journal as a Notable Woman in Construction and helps lead the continued growth of her family’s business, which builds sports facilities and athletic surfaces along the entire East Coast.

Crews now work on projects from Maine to Florida, and products developed by the company are being marketed across the entire United States. It is a career she never could have predicted as a college student, yet one she now sees as the natural result of everything that came before it.

“You think you’re on one path,” she reflected, “and then life goes in a different direction. Somehow you’re ready for it.”

That readiness began long before construction entered the picture.

Choosing Merrimack

Unlike some students who spend years planning exactly where they want to attend college, Kate’s path to Merrimack was shaped by something more personal.

One of her brothers had attended the College before her, so the campus was already familiar. She visited often with her family and liked what she experienced. When it came time to choose a school herself, Merrimack simply felt right.

“It was close to family, close to Boston and close to skiing,” she laughed. “It just felt like the right place.”

Athletics also played a role.

Kate played both soccer and tennis growing up, and Merrimack’s tennis program needed players. Coach Rick Edelman and the team welcomed her immediately, making the transition to college easier than she expected.

“Being an athlete on campus was awesome,” she said. “My teammates were super welcoming.”

That welcoming spirit became one of the defining characteristics of her Merrimack experience.

“The campus was so beautiful,” she recalled. “It’s the kind of place that holds the door open.”

She meant that literally, of course, but also figuratively.

In an increasingly hurried world where people often walk by one another with their eyes fixed on a phone, Kate remembers Merrimack as a place where kindness was part of everyday life.

“When everyone’s looking down,” she said, “you’ve got to look up and hold the door open for other people. Do the right thing. Do the kind thing.”

Years later, raising two children of her own, she still finds herself returning to those same values.

“The community values, the kindness,” she said. “Those definitely stayed with me.”

Discovering a Bigger World

Kate graduated expecting to begin a career in business.

What she did not expect was that her first job would take her around the globe.

She joined the Council on International Educational Exchange (CIEE), helping recruit international students participating in J-1 Visa programs. What began as an accounting role quickly expanded into something much larger.

By the age of 23, Kate had traveled to 36 countries, predominantly in Europe.

“It really teaches you how to think on your feet,” she said. “You’re in different cultures, making decisions, figuring things out.”

The travel was exhilarating, demanding and, at times, exhausting. Yet it also became one of the most formative experiences of her young career.

When she looks back now, Kate sees a direct connection between those years abroad and the confidence she would later need as a business leader.

Merrimack’s international business courses had sparked her curiosity well before graduation. In fact, she remembers recruiters being especially interested in that part of her education because it demonstrated a broader perspective than many new graduates possessed.

“I never thought I’d travel to so many wonderful countries,” she said. “Merrimack gave me that opportunity.”

Learning to Lead

After her years of international travel, Kate transitioned into banking, joining TD Bank’s Merchant Services Division.

At the same time, she pursued an MBA, continuing to build on the financial and business knowledge she had first developed at Merrimack.

The work challenged her in new ways and eventually led to a promotion as a Cash Management Officer.

Then life changed course again.

When COVID arrived, Kate made the decision to join her husband’s family business.

Like many family businesses, it presented both opportunity and complexity. 

Construction remains a heavily male-dominated industry, and stepping into a leadership role required both confidence and resilience.

Looking back, Kate realizes she was drawing on experiences that had been preparing her for years. The teamwork she learned through athletics, the confidence she gained while navigating unfamiliar cultures across the world, and the business fundamentals she developed in Merrimack’s classrooms all became part of the toolkit she relied upon.

Just as important were the relationships she built with faculty. Merrimack’s smaller class sizes created opportunities to ask questions, advocate for herself, and develop genuine connections with professors who saw students as individuals rather than faces in a lecture hall. 

“You were able to be a human,” Kate said. “You could advocate for yourself.” 

It was an environment that encouraged both independence and support, a combination that proved invaluable as she stepped into increasingly complex leadership roles.

More Than Business

Ask Kate about the company’s growth, and she is just as likely to talk about people as she is about projects.

Yes, the business continues to expand, with crews working from Maine to Florida and products reaching customers across the country, but those accomplishments are rarely the first things she mentions. Instead, she talks about teammates, about creating opportunities for employees, and about building a workplace where people feel valued.

Now that the company has grown, she sees an opportunity to invest more intentionally in the people who make that success possible. 

“It’s about people,” she said, emphasizing the word. “I think that’s something I can bring to the company.”

That perspective feels remarkably consistent with the values she first experienced at Merrimack.

Kate talks frequently about ideas of kindness, teamwork, community, and respect. Long after the finance courses, business projects and tennis matches became memories, those values remained, shaping not only the leader she has become but also the kind of organization she hopes to help build.

The Foundation Beneath the Surface

Kate often returns to the image of a tennis court.

For years she competed on courts without thinking about what made them possible. The engineering. The planning. The countless layers beneath the finished surface.

Today she understands that none of what people see would exist without that unseen foundation.

The same could be said of her own life.

Long before she entered construction, before she traveled the world, before she earned her MBA or helped lead a growing family business, another foundation was taking shape.

It was built through teammates who became lifelong friends and professors who knew students by name and encouraged them to advocate for themselves.

It was built through experiences that stretched beyond the classroom and opportunities that expanded her view of the world and a community that believed success was measured not only by achievement, but by how people treated one another along the way.

Looking back, Kate doesn’t see a career that followed a carefully designed blueprint. She sees a series of experiences that, at the time, seemed only loosely connected. Athletics. International travel. Business school. Banking. Construction. Yet each became another layer in a foundation that was preparing her for whatever came next.

Like the courts her company now builds, the most important work happened beneath the surface. Because that foundation was built at Merrimack, every chapter that followed had something solid on which to stand.

This article originally appeared in the Alumni News & Spotlights section of the Merrimack College website: https://www.merrimack.edu/alumni_friends/alumni-news/alumni-spotlight-kate-eren-04/