Institutes of higher physical education do not always cope with the task of training highly qualified athletes who possess not only practical professional skills, but also a sufficient store of theoretical knowledge, creative abilities, and skills in handling up-to-date techniques for continuing their professional activity as trainers, for example. Team practice sessions and competitions of different levels force student-athletes to spend most part of the learning process far from the educational institution. This problem can be solved by creating and implementing (in the conditions of virtual educational environment (VEE) in the institutes of higher physical education) a model of educational process which would combine both traditional and distance training technologies. This would make it possible for students of different modes of study (full-time, full-time according to individual plans, and part-time) to combine sports with education. The developed model of VEE is based on the ecological and learner-centered (V. A. Yasvin) and the ecological and psychological (V. I. Panov) models of educational environment. The teaching of Physics and Computer Science is taken as an example. According to the above models, the structure of VEE, its components, and the dynamic connections and relations between them are in correspondence with the interests of student athletes and with the features of their socio-cultural environment, educational and training processes, etc. This model consists of a number of interconnected blocks: motivational-and-objective, content-related, organizational-andtechnological, and evaluative-and-resultative. Together these blocks reveal the objective, tasks, didactic conditions, organization principles and technologies, efficiency evaluation criteria and levels of the VEE model. The constructed VEE model aims to form motivation and need for educational and communicative activities in student athletes; to give basic knowledge, skills and competence in Physics and Computer Science, to develop abilities to apply information technologies in educational and communicative activities. It is assumed the adoption of this model will make it possible to improve the process of education of student athletes in the institutes of higher physical education.
