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The Jurupa Valley High School girls’ volleyball team in California has now had at least 10 matches on its 2025 schedule canceled due to a national controversy involving one of its players, who is transgender.
Los Osos High School lost a tournament game to Jurupa Valley on Saturday, while Patriot High School lost its varsity game on Monday, marking its second forfeit against JVHS this season. Patriot High School previously lost a Sept. 26 game against Jurupa Valley.
Maribel Munoz, the mother of Jurupa Valley player Alyssa McPherson, provided PK Press Club Digital with a copy of a message sent by JVHS head coach Liana Manu announcing the varsity game against Patriot was lost. The JV and Freshman games were still being played.
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A California school board president close to the situation also confirmed to PK Press Club Digital that Patriot High School’s varsity team did not play its Monday game against Jurupa Valley while the JV and freshman teams were playing.
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 forfeited Jurupa Valley after the two teams met in the consolation round of a neutral tournament this weekend. This game is currently listed as a forfeit on the high school sports tracking website MaxPreps. No official reason for the packages was provided by the schools.
PK Press Club Digital reached out to the Jurupa Unified School District, home to Jurupa Valley and Patriot High School, as well as the Chaffey Joint Union High School District, home to Los Osos, for a response.
“Patriot will forgo varsity level but lower levels will play. We already expected this,” Manu’s text message read.
Patriot High School shares a league and school district with JVHS, and in losing for the second time this season, Jurupa Valley remains a perfect 9-0 in league play and in first place heading into the final regular season game. Jurupa Valley will face Norte Vista High School on Wednesday with a chance to clinch the top seed heading into the playoffs. JVHS previously defeated Norte Vista 3-2 in their first meeting on October 1.
Meanwhile, Patriot High School and Los Osos join Southern California high school girls volleyball teams at Riverside Poly, Orange Vista, Rim of The World, AB Miller, Yucaipa, Aquinas and San Dimas in declining to play Jurupa Valley this season. No official reason for the forfeits has been provided by any of these schools.
Two of Jurupa Valley’s senior players, McPherson and Hadeel Hazameh, withdrew from the team this season in protest against their trans teammate AB Hernandez.
McPherson and Hazameh also filed a lawsuit against the Jurupa Unified School District, citing their experience playing and sharing a locker room with Hernandez over the previous three seasons. McPherson’s older sister and former JVHS girls volleyball player, Madison McPherson, is the third plaintiff in the lawsuit.
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Jurupa Valley is poised to make the playoffs, where the forfeits could continue. Last season, a girls’ volleyball team at a Northern California Christian high school, Stone Ridge Christian, lost a playoff match to San Francisco Waldorf, which had a trans athlete on its team.
AB Hernandez shares second place on the long jump podium with a competitor at the California State Track and Field Championships. (Courtesy of Beth Bourne)
Jurupa Valley won its league with Hernandez on its team in 2024, but with much less attention and controversy than this year.
Hernandez then gained national attention in the spring during a high-profile run at the state girls’ track and field championships. The trans athlete took first place in the women’s high jump and triple jump after President Donald Trump sent a message from Truth Social warning California not to allow a trans athlete to compete in the women’s 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 who competed in the same events at Hernandez a spot in the competition or a higher spot on the medal podium if she finished behind a biological male athlete.
The rule change allowed Hernandez to share 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 policies to comply with Trump’s executive order to “keep men out of women’s sports.”
California Governor Gavin Newsom’s office previously provided a statement to PK Press Club Digital, placing blame for the situation on the CIF, CDE and the state legislature.
“The 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 authority of the governor. The CIF and CDE have said they follow existing state law — a law that was passed in 2013 and signed by Gov. Jerry Brown (not Newsom) and in line with 21 other states. For If the law changes, the Legislature should send a bill to the governor. This is not the case,” the statement said.
AB Hernandez shares first place on the triple jump podium at the California State Track and Field Championships with a competitor. (Courtesy of Beth Bourne)
On April 1, the California State Legislature blocked two invoices This would overturn the current law that allows men to play women’s sports. All Democrats voted against it, with Rep. Rick Chavez Zbur saying 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 and excluded from public life.”
Zbur said this in the presence of a descendant of a Holocaust survivor, who had to excuse himself from leaving the chamber, according to Republican Assembly member Kate Sanchez.
“She got up and left because she was so disgusted by the comparison,” Sanchez told PK Press Club Digital.
In July, Newsom spoke about the issue in an interview on the “The Shawn Ryan Show,” saying he’s been “incredibly frustrated” by it and regularly encounters parents who are angry about state policies at his children’s soccer games.
“All the parents who come say, ‘This is so unfair.’ Like “Whoa”, like everywhere I’ve been, progressive people, not bigots, who are champions of trans politics like me, but who don’t like sports. 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 first comments in March while speaking to Kirk, and even recalled an alleged conversation with Trump about it.
“And now he’s chasing us and threatening us, and they’re just, and you know, I’m the poster child,” Newsom added. “But I think we need to solve this problem.”
