EASTHAM — Amina Iliusinova had never run track before she joined the team at Nauset Regional High School as a junior last spring. She had been a high jumper at her previous home in Volgograd, Russia, but she hadn’t ever competed on a school team. Extracurricular sports were rare in that country, she says, and most people didn’t take them seriously.

But when Iliusinova left Volgograd for America with her family in 2022, she found a different athletic culture. “It was inspiring for me to see how serious the people here are about sports,” she says.

Her goal, she says, is simple: she wants to be the fastest.

Iliusinova started by joining Nauset’s outdoor track team, running the 800 meters. At the Cape & Islands Championships in Barnstable on May 20, she finished fifth with a time of 2:46, a personal record. In the fall, she signed up for cross country and qualified for the state championship in Devens on Nov. 6, completing the 5,000 meters in 21:36 and finishing 50th overall.

This season, Iliusinova is running the 1,000 meters on Nauset’s indoor track team. Her best time is 3 minutes, 27.64 seconds, which she achieved on Dec. 17 at the season’s second Cape and Islands meet, held at Wheaton College in Norton. Once again, she was fifth overall.

Coach Moira Nobili says it’s unusual for someone new to track to show this much promise so quickly. It usually takes two or three years for athletes to grow into a sport, which is fine by her. She prefers to let students try things out and see what they like.

“As long as I see improvement over the course of the season, I don’t care if they never score a point,” says the coach.

But right away Nobili could tell that Iliusinova’s commitment set her apart. For Iliusinova, it was never about qualifying for a specific meet; it was all about pushing herself to be faster. At the end of the regular season, Nobili says, Iliusinova turned in her uniform, not knowing she had been invited to compete in the divisional championship.

“She asked me what a divisional meet was,” Nobili says. “She had no idea. When I told her, she just said, ‘OK, I’ll go.’ ”

Iliusinova took 25th overall in the divisional meet with a time of 21:34 in the 5,000. She came back to Cape Cod in time to clock in for her job at a pizza parlor later that afternoon. Nobili says Iliusinova did the same when she competed in the state championship a week later.

Once, when Nobili was running alongside the students, she had to put her arm out to get Iliusinova to slow down. “I had to explain to her that if you go hard all the time, eventually your body will just shut down,” Nobili says.

Senior Madeline Mahoney currently holds the record for the 1,000 meters on the girls team: 3 minutes, 0.64 seconds — less than a tenth of a second behind the school’s all-time record of 3 minutes, 0.58 seconds, set in 2020 by Nobili’s daughter Isabelle.

Mahoney, who is the indoor track team captain, knows there are other students vying for her position atop the leaderboard. But she welcomes the competition because it helps her remember that she needs to keep working hard. “I never like to get overconfident,” she says, “because that’s when people start to make mistakes.”

Mahoney has ambitious plans: she’s applying to the U.S. Naval Academy, where she hopes to continue running track. She’s also applied to the Air Force Academy in Colorado and West Point. All of those schools have strict application rules.

“It’s a whole process,” Mahoney laughs, “but I’m getting to the end of it. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.”

Like Iliusinova, Mahoney didn’t see herself competing in track when she started high school. She says she joined the team on a whim sophomore year. “I wanted to do a sport here,” she says, “and I figured anyone can run.”

Nobili says the fact that students can join track on a whim is one thing she loves about the sport.

This winter, both of Iliusinova’s younger sisters, Aidana, a sophomore, and Diana, a freshman, joined the team. They say they saw how much their sister was enjoying the challenge and wanted to follow in her footsteps. Both run the 55 and 300 meters.

“What I love about them,” Nobili says, “is that they put it in their minds that this is what they want to do, and then they just do it. Some kids say they’re tired. Not them.”

The team’s next meet is with Barnstable High on Jan. 3 at Wheaton College.