PhD, Associate Professor P.A. Baev
Baikal State University, Irkutsk

Keywords: sports, sports volunteers, social activity, motivation, students.

Introduction. Currently, volunteering is quite common during sports competitions. The pro-social activity of volunteers becomes a tool of social communication behind the scenes of sports competitions. In this aspect, it becomes relevant to identify personal motives and strategies for the social realization of sports volunteers [1].
The purpose of the study is to identify the motives of students' participation in volunteer work during sports competitions.
Methodology and organization of the study. The scientific work was attended by 800 volunteer students in the organization of municipal, regional and federal sports competitions aged 18 to 25 years, among whom 54% are girls and 46% are boys engaged in volunteer activities during sports competitions (carrying out prosocial activities). The search for volunteers for the study was carried out through the sports federations of the Siberian Federal District.
The results of the study and their discussion. Volunteer students explain their participation in sports competitions with the following motives.
The motive of revealing social connections and social communications through acquaintance with athletes from different cities, regions, and maybe countries (28%). Young people in this group often seek to gain language practice in communicating with foreign athletes or build personal social connections for closer communication in the future.
The motive for obtaining the necessary acquaintances and connections not only with athletes, but also with coaches, sponsors and other participants and organizers of sports competitions (24%). Sports volunteering allows participants to change the circle of social interaction and subsequently enter the desired sports environment.
The motive of the desire to make up for the personal inability to participate in competitions (22%) is the desire to be closer to sports, as a rule, is realized among student–athletes who have been injured and temporarily or permanently eliminated from competitions. They do not want to lose touch with sports, with their friends and rivals, and therefore they are involved in a volunteer environment to organize the process of social communication beyond the framework of sports competitions themselves.
The motive of social activity and publicity (18%). Volunteers with this motive are interested in public participation in mass sports events.
The motivation for the internship is 13%. As a rule, these are young people from different specialties who are interested not in the sport itself, but in the desire to close their practice (as a rule, these are students studying in various managerial specialties or specialties of social work or social communications).
Conclusions. The study revealed five main motives for student volunteers to participate in sports competitions: from narcissistic to pragmatic, from the experience that they themselves cannot participate to the desire to participate in the next competitions as an athlete. This suggests that the prosocial activity of sports volunteers is an ambiguous space of social realization, which requires attention and research by scientists from different disciplines: from psychologists to sociologists, from conflictologists to specialists in the field of intercultural dialogue.

Literature

1. Polyushkevich, O.A., & Ivanov, R.V. (2023). Prosocial practices in sports activities. Teoriya i praktika fizicheskoy kul'tury, (2), 50.