The pairing of physical culture with the tasks of patriotic education of senior schoolchildren remains substantively heterogeneous: regulatory documents fix the educative outcome of the subject area as mandatory, whereas at the level of classroom and extracurricular practice the patriotic dimension is often reduced to isolated events symbolically timed to commemorative dates. The gap between the declared educative potential and its methodological support for the 15-17 age group has been addressed in the specialized literature only fragmentarily. The aim of the work is to construct an author's model describing the resource potential of physical culture in the patriotic education of senior schoolchildren and systematizing the factors that impede its realization. Conceptual-categorial analysis, structural-functional modelling, content analysis of the current federal educational standards and comparative systematization of pedagogical means were applied. Four components of the resource were distinguished – value-semantic, historical-cultural, activity-volitional and social-communicative – and their uneven methodological coverage was established: the historical-cultural and social-communicative components are supported more weakly than the others. Mapping the personal and metasubject requirements of the standard onto the means of the subject area showed that the greatest educative effect is concentrated not in the normative part of the lesson but in collective-competitive and physical-culture local-history formats of extracurricular activity. The systematization of barriers revealed that the decisive factors are not material-technical deficits but the weakness of the methodological link between motor content and the value plane, reinforced by the motivational features of senior adolescence. The resulting picture indicates that the educative return of the subject area is achieved by reconfiguring the already-applied forms of work toward the value-semantic task rather than by introducing a separate patriotic module on top of physical training.