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A nationally controversial season ended Wednesday night for a California high school girls volleyball team.
Jurupa Valley High School lost its first round playoff match to Valencia High School in straight sets. This 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 from the team’s schedule and a lawsuit against the school district was filed by two current and one former teammates of Hernandez.
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Transgender player AB Hernandez (4) of Jurupa Valley watches during a Norte Vista High School girls’ volleyball game at Norte Vista High School on October 16, 2025, in Riverside, California. (Kirby Lee/Getty Images)
Still, Hernández and other JVHS players continued their season and finished as co-champions of the River Valley League, winning a playoff game against Valencia. But this wasn’t a typical high school playoff game.
Multiple sources, including Leandra Blades, board trustee for the Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified School District, which is home to Valencia High School, confirmed to PK Press Club Digital that at least one of Valencia’s players did not show up on the field Wednesday to avoid confronting Hernandez.
Next in the stands were several female sports activists, led by California Family Council Outreach Director Sophia Lorey. The activists included local teenage girls, some of whom have competed alongside or against Hernandez in the past.
“Save Girls’ Sports” protesters gather at a California high school volleyball game involving a trans athlete, October 22, 2025. (Courtesy of Sophia Lorey)
Lorey presented videos to PK Press Club Digital that showed other spectators at the game heckling the girls in attendance who were there with Lorey.
And despite all the pomp and circumstance, it wasn’t even Hernandez’s first playoff volleyball match. Hernandez had competed for Jurupa Valley each of the last three years and also made the playoffs in 2024.
But national attention and controversy reached 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 ran to the girls’ state finals in the long jump, triple jump and high jump, prompting Trump to send a Truth Social message 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 women’s sports in February, but the California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) has consistently defied him.
Instead, the CIF changed its rules to award any female athlete who competed in the same events at Hernandez a place in the competition or a higher place on the medal podium if she finished behind a biological male athlete.
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Hernández then took first place in the high jump and triple jump, as well as second place in the long jump.
The rule change allowed Hernandez to share podium spots with female athletes who finished behind the trans athlete in the state finals.
The U.S. 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 policies to comply with Trump’s executive order “Keep Men Out of Women’s Sports.”
Newsom’s office previously provided a statement to PK Press Club Digital, shifting responsibility for the situation to 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.
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.
No policy changes have been made. So Hernandez was allowed to compete as a girl, become a national spectacle, and then play one final season of high school volleyball, sparking protests from her opponents and teammates.
Two of Jurupa Valley’s senior players, McPherson and Hadeel Hazameh, moved away from the team this season in protest against the trans athlete.
McPherson and Hazameh also filed a complaint 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.
And now that the fall sports season is coming to an end, Hernandez is still eligible to compete in another girls’ track and field season in the spring.
