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A nationally contested season ended Wednesday night for a California high school girls volleyball team.
Jurupa Valley High School lost their first round state playoff game to Valencia High School in straight sets. The loss likely marked the end of trans athlete AB Hernandez’s high school volleyball career.
Jurupa Valley’s 2025 season was overshadowed by a national controversy centered on Hernandez. The team saw 10 games lost outside of the team’s schedule, and a lawsuit against the school district was filed by two current and one former teammate of Hernandez.
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Transgender player AB Hernandez (4) of Jurupa Valley looks on during a girls high school volleyball match against Norte Vista at Norte Vista High School on October 16, 2025 in Riverside, California. (Kirby Lee/Getty Images)
Still, Hernandez and other JVHS players continued their season, finishing as River Valley League co-champions and earning a playoff game against Valencia. But it wasn’t any typical high school playoff game.
Multiple sources, including board trustee Leandra Blades of the Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified School District, which houses Valencia High School, confirmed to Pakinomist Digital that at least one of Valencia’s players did not take the court Wednesday to avoid facing Hernandez.
Then in the stands were several women’s sports activists in attendance, led by California Family Council Outreach Director Sophia Lorey. The activists included local teenage girls, some of whom competed alongside or against Hernandez in the past.
‘Save Girls’ Sports’ protesters gather at a California high school volleyball game involving a trans athlete on October 22, 2025. (Courtesy of Sophia Lorey)
Lorey presented videos to Pakinomist Digital showing other spectators at the game showing off girls who were there with Lorey.
And for all the pomp and circumstance, it wasn’t even Hernandez’s first playoff volleyball game. Hernandez had competed for Jurupa Valley each of the past three years and also went to the postseason in 2024.
But the added national attention and controversy hit the team this year after Hernandez was thrust into the center of a political conflict between President Donald Trump and California Gov. Gavin Newsom at the end of the spring track and field season.
Hernandez made it to the girls’ state finals in the long jump, triple jump and high jump, prompting Trump to send a Truth Social post in the days leading up to the event warning Newsom and the state not to allow a trans athlete to compete in the girls’ events. Trump signed an executive order banning schools from allowing biological males to play in girls’ sports in February, but the California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) has persistently defied it.
Instead, the 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 podium if they finished behind a biologically male athlete.
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Hernandez then took first place in the high jump and triple jump and second place in the long jump.
The rule change resulted in Hernandez sharing podium spots with female athletes who finished behind the trans athlete in the state finals.
The US Department of Justice then 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.
Newsom’s office previously provided 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.
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.
No policy changes were made. So Hernandez was allowed to compete as a girl, become a national play and then play one final season of high school volleyball, igniting protests from opponents and teammates alike.
Two of Jurupa Valley’s senior players, McPherson and Hadeel Hazameh, stepped away from the team this season in protest of the trans athlete.
McPherson and Hazameh have too filed suit 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.
Now that the fall sports season is coming to an end, Hernandez is still eligible to compete in another girls season in the spring.
