Team identification is a strong predictor of sport fan consumption behavior. Fans high in team identification are more likely to attend games, pay more for tickets, spend more money on team merchandise, and stay loyal to the team during periods of poor performance. While a great deal is known regarding the effects of team identification, few researchers have specified that motives in general are antecedents of team identification. Although some research has used the relationships between identification and motives for psychometric purposes, no one has examined the effects of specific motives on the variance of team identification. Therefore, this study examined the effects of eight motives (vicarious achievement, acquisition of knowledge, aesthetics, social interaction, drama/excitement, escape, family, and quality of physical skill of the participants) in order to determine which contributed the most to the variance of team identification. Data were collected from spectators at two (one men's, n=168, and one women's, n=196) intercollegiate basketball games at a large Southern university. Female respondents made up 53.8% of the total sample. Males comprised 61.2% of the respondents at the men's games and 34.3% of the respondents at the women's games. A majority of all respondents were Caucasian (85.2%). Through the use of structural equation modeling (SEM) we found that vicarious achievement explained the most variance in team identification (40%). Although five of the other seven motives had point estimates that were significant, the amount of variance they explained in identification was limited (between 1% and 3%). We also investigated whether gender had an effect on the motives-identification relationship. Although the models were significantly different, the relationships among the motive paths to identification changed little. For both men and women, the vicarious achievement motive explained the most variance in team identification (men 50% and women 30%), each of the remainder of the motives explained less than 5% of identification variance for either men or women. This knowledge could allow sport marketers to more effectively "tap into" and, perhaps, reinforce team identification through the utilization of the vicarious achievement motive by encouraging more interaction between fans and players/coaches.Keyword(s): administration/mgmt, athletics/sports, sport management