The aim of this study is to determine the reasons of motivation of sports high school students and to determine whether these reasons differ according to gender or doing individual sports and team sports. The study included totally 110 sports students who aged between 14 and 18, were doing three individuals sports (table tennis, weight lifting, judo) and three team sports (handball, volleyball, basketball) were subjected to evaluation. The students are 69 male and 41 female individuals. "Sport Motivation Scale" developed by Pelletier et al. (1995) was used as the data collection tool. The Turkish validity and reliability of the scale consisting of 28 items was performed by Kazak (2004). SPSS (Ver.22) package program were used. The data are presented as frequency, percentage (%), mean and standard deviation. In addition, the normal distribution of data with Kolmogorov Smirnov test was used. Independent Samples t test was used to determine the differences between the variables (individual sport- team sport) with normal distribution. The significance level was accepted as 0.05 in the analyses. In conclusion, it was determined that the reasons of motivation of students who were doing individual sports and team sports depended more on intrinsic motivational factors, and that the order of importance of these factors varied according to the individual sports and team sports variable. It was determined that the reasons of motivation of males and females mainly depended on intrinsic factors and the order of importance of these factors varied according to the gender variable. It can be said that male and female students wanted to get pleasure from the sports they did and to be successful in their sports, thus, they were motivated accordingly.