Shaun Alexander has always been a winner. If you ask him the secret of his success, he will probably list more than just one—including the vital component of exemplary teamwork.

Teamwork has been a part of Alexander’s competitive life as long as he’s been donning pads and strapping on a helmet. It fueled his success at Boone County High School in Florence, Kentucky, and vetted his Southeastern Conference (SEC) championship run at Alabama in 1999. The same holds true for the Seattle Seahawks’ 2005 National Football Conference title that led to a berth in Super Bowl XL.

Trust is a funny thing. It takes years to build but can be destroyed in an instant. Trust requires honesty, communication, loyalty and proven moral integrity. It is one of the foundational elements behind every great team.

Andy Pettitte knows all about the fragile nature of trust. He has spent his entire life building up trustworthy relationships with his family, his friends, his teammates, the baseball community and the public at large. Yet a single seemingly insignificant misstep can open the door for doubt, which often then results in a certain measure of distrust. In today’s society, it doesn’t take much for a cynical public (and an even more cynical media) to question one’s integrity and chip away at that bedrock of trust.

It’s usually a good rule of thumb to stay away from stereotypes and cultural clichés in order to avoid potentially embarrassing confrontations with the obligatory “exception to the rule.” But in Curtis Brown’s case, even he admits that a predictable portion of life in Saskatchewan—his native Canadian province—can be described in two words: farming and hockey.

Born in the small rural town of Unity, Brown grew up on a farm where he instinctively fell in line with the majority of his young friends. “What Canadians do is hockey,” Brown says. “I was probably about four when I started skating. I was just like the other kids. If you didn’t play hockey, you were definitely an outsider.”

When Tamika Catchings was in the third grade, she played on her first basketball team alongside sister Tauja. Her father, Harvey Catchings—an 11-year NBA player—was the coach of the squad that, other than his daughters, consisted of boys. The fact that Catchings and her sister were the only girls on the team is an interesting fact, but it’s not nearly as telling as the principles they learned from their dad’s coaching style. “We had to learn how to play as a group,” Catchings recalls. “My dad always preached about how it was a team effort. We got that drilled in our head.”