Captain, vice captains and past players will tell you it means everything to win the Solheim Cup. It also takes everything.From inspirational videos that pull on players’ emotions to music that everyone can sing along to on the team bus. It is about choosing the right 12 players and having the best team around them.It takes many factors to produce a winning team at the biennial tournament, first played in 1990. Each time the Solheim Cup is contested, it falls on two captains, one from Europe and the United States, to conjure a winning formula across an intense three days of golf.The Athletic spoke with six Solheim Cup-winning captains. They have eight wins and three losses between them as leaders. And plenty more victories and defeats as players. They each know what it takes to win, and what it means to fall agonisingly short.This week, the honour falls to Anna Nordqvist of Europe and U.S. counterpart Angela Stanford to lead their teams at Bernardus Golf, near Den Bosch, in the Netherlands.In September 2011, on the night before the Solheim Cup got underway at Killeen Castle, Alison Nicholas, Europe’s captain, had a special video message to show her players. It was a clip she had played to them two years earlier, before their defeat to the U.S. in Illinois. But this time it hit differently.The video included a message from legendary Spanish golfer Seve Ballesteros, who had passed away four months earlier, in May 2011.“You ought to have seen the room when we played that, it was incredible,” says Nicholas, whose team entered the final day locked at 8-8 but pushed through Irish rain delays and momentum shifts to win 15-13. “Everybody was just silent and in awe of the situation. A lot of people were in tears.“I’ve still got the DVD. No one is allowed to see it because I had to sign a disclaimer. A lot of the players wanted a copy but I wasn’t allowed to do that.”Alison Nicholas and her team pay tribute to Seve Ballesteros at Killeen Castle in 2011 (Adrian Dennis/AFP via Getty Images)Motivational videos are something of a Solheim Cup tradition.As captain, Betsy King inspired the U.S. to victory in Sweden in 2007. With help from the Golf Channel, King spent months in the lead-up to the tournament working on an inspirational montage to show her players. Together they pulled clips from the 2004 Disney movie Miracle, which chronicled the U.S. men’s hockey team’s improbable gold-medal victory over the Soviets at the 1980 Olympics. King, a six-time major winner, showed the video to the team before the opening ceremony in Halmstad.“We also put videos of the players making putts, hitting great shots to music just to give them positive reinforcement,” the 71-year-old says. “And the next night they requested to see it again.”Creating a positive and professional environment around the team is key to success. But many captains say the importance of having fun should not be underestimated — fun that almost always includes a ping pong table in the team room.“For us, the times I was playing and we won, we had a great time on, and especially off, the golf course — we had a tremendous team atmosphere,” says Catrin Nilsmark, who captained Europe to victory in her native Sweden in 2003. “It’s hard to explain why when you’re having great fun in the team room you make more putts and hit more fairways.”Nilsmark recalls how the song Let Me Entertain You by Robbie Williams became the team’s anthem at Barsebäck Golf & Country Club, when Europe won 17.5-10.5 under her captaincy. Scot Catriona Matthew, who would go on to captain consecutive Solheim Cups victories in 2019 and 2021, was part of that winning team.