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Jurupa Valley High School’s girls volleyball team in California has now seen at least 10 games on its 2025 schedule lost amid a national controversy involving one of its players, who is transgender.
Los Osos High School lost a tournament game against Jurupa Valley on Saturday, while Patriot High School lost its Monday varsity game, marking its second loss to JVHS this season. Patriot High School previously lost a game on Sept. 26 to Jurupa Valley.
Maribel Munoz, mother of Jurupa Valley player Alyssa McPherson, provided Pakinomist Digital with a copy of a message sent by JVHS head coach Liana Manu announcing the varsity game against Patriot was forfeit. The JV and freshman games were still played.
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A California school board president close to the situation also confirmed to Pakinomist Digital that the Patriot High School varsity team did not play its Monday game against Jurupa Valley while the JV and freshman teams did.
Jurupa Valley High School girls volleyball players Hadeel Hazameh and Alyssa McPherson say they won’t compete as long as a trans athlete is on their team. (Courtesy of Jessica Tapia)
Los Osos lost to Jurupa Valley after the two teams were matched up in the consolation round of a neutral tournament over the weekend. That game is currently logged as a forfeit on the high school sports tracking website MaxPreps. The schools have not given an official reason for the forfeiture.
Pakinomist Digital reached out to the Jurupa Unified School District, which houses Jurupa Valley and Patriot High Schools, and the Chaffey Joint Union High School District, which houses Los Osos, for a response.
“Patriot will lose varsity but lower levels will play. We already expected that,” Manu’s text read.
Patriot High School shares a league and school district with JVHS, and by losing for the second time this season, it keeps Jurupa Valley a perfect 9-0 in league play and in first place going into the final game of the regular season. Jurupa Valley will face Norte Vista High School on Wednesday with a chance to clinch first place in the playoffs. JVHS has already beaten Norte Vista 3-2 in their first meeting on October 1st.
Meanwhile, Patriot High School and Los Osos join other Southern California high school girls volleyball teams of Riverside Poly, Orange Vista, Rim of The World, AB Miller, Yucaipa, Aquinas and San Dimas in refusing to face Jurupa Valley this season. None of these schools have given any official reason for the forfeiture.
Two of Jurupa Valley’s senior players, McPherson and Hadeel Hazameh, stepped away from the team this season in protest of trans teammate AB Hernandez.
McPherson and Hazameh have also filed a lawsuit against the Jurupa Unified School District citing their experience playing and sharing a locker room with Hernandez the previous three seasons. McPherson’s older sister and former JVHS girls volleyball player Madison McPherson is the third plaintiff in this lawsuit.
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Jurupa Valley is ready to play in the postseason, where the losses could continue. Last season, a Northern California Christian high school girls volleyball team, Stone Ridge Christian, lost a playoff game to San Francisco Waldorf, which had a trans athlete on its team.
AB Hernandez shares the long jump runner-up medal stand with a female competitor at the California State Track and Field Championships. (Courtesy of Beth Bourne)
Jurupa Valley won their league with Hernandez on its team in 2024, albeit with far less attention and controversy than this year.
Hernandez then gained national attention this spring during a highly publicized run to the state girls track and field championships. The trans athlete took first place in the girls’ high jump and triple jump after President Donald Trump sent a Truth Social post warning California not to allow a trans athlete to compete in the girls’ events just days before the state meet on the last day of May.
Amid Trump’s warning and national and local backlash, the state’s high school sports league, the California Interscholastic Federation (CIF), changed its rules to award any female athlete competing in the same events to Hernandez a place in the competition or a place higher on the medal stand if they finished behind a biologically male athlete.
The rule change resulted in Hernandez sharing podium spots with female athletes who finished behind the trans athlete in the state finals. Hernandez also finished second in the long jump.
The U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against the CIF and the California Department of Education a month later in July for refusing to change its transgender policy to comply with Trump’s “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” executive order.
California Governor Gavin Newsom’s office previously issued a statement to Pakinomist Digital deferring responsibility for the situation to CIF, CDE and the state legislature.
“CIF is an independent, nonprofit organization that governs high school sports. The California Department of Education is a separate constitutional office. Neither is under the governor’s authority. CIF and CDE have stated that they follow existing state law — a law passed in 2013 and signed by Gov. Jerry Brown (not Newsom) and consistent with 21 other states to which the law must be changed in order to Do must be changed. they do not have the bill, the statement read.
AB Hernandez shares first place on the triple jump podium at the California track and field championships with a female competitor. (Courtesy of Beth Bourne)
On April 1, the California state legislature blocked two bills it would change the current law, which allows men in girls’ sports. All Democrats voted against it, and Assemblyman Rick Chavez Zbur argued that one of the bills “really reminds me of what happened in Nazi Germany in the 1930s. We’re moving toward autocracy in this country. In Nazi Germany, transgender people were persecuted, excluded from public life.”
Zbur said this while in the presence of a descendant of a Holocaust survivor who had to excuse himself from the chamber, according to GOP Assemblywoman Kate Sanchez.
“She got up and left because she was just so disgusted by the comparison,” Sanchez told Pakinomist Digital.
In July, Newsom spoke about the issue in an interview on “The Shawn Ryan Show,” says he has been “incredibly frustrated by it” and that he regularly encounters parents angry about the state’s policy at his children’s football games.
“Every parent that comes up is like, ‘That’s so unfair.’ Like, ‘Wow,’ like everywhere I went, progressive-minded people, not bigots who are champions of trans politics like I am, but didn’t like the sport. They were like, ‘Come on man, you gotta figure this out,'” Newsom said.
Newsom added that his allies in the LGBTQ caucus were “furious” with him after he made his initial comments in March while speaking with Kirk, even recalling an alleged conversation with Trump about it.
“And now he’s suing and threatening us and they’re just, and you know, I’m the poster child,” Newsom added. “But I think we need to solve that problem.”
