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A nationally controversial season came to an end Wednesday night for a high school girls volleyball team in California.
Jurupa Valley High School lost its first round state playoff match to Valencia High School in straight sets. The loss, presumably, 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 on the team’s schedule, and two current teammates and a former teammate of Hernandez filed a lawsuit against the school district.
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Jurupa Valley transgender player AB Hernandez (4) watches 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 with their season and finished as co-champions of the River Valley League, earning a playoff game against Valencia. But it wasn’t your typical high school playoff game.
Multiple sources, including board member Leandra Blades of the Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified School District, which is home to Valencia High School, confirmed to Pak Gazette Digital that at least one of Valencia’s players did not take the court Wednesday to avoid facing Hernandez.
Then, in the stands, several female sports activists were present, led by California Family Council Outreach Director Sophia Lorey. Among the activists were local teenagers, some of whom ran 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 Sofía Lorey)
Lorey submitted videos to Pak Gazette Digital that showed other spectators at the game booing the girls in attendance who were there with Lorey.
And despite all the pomp and circumstance, it wasn’t even Hernandez’s first postseason volleyball match. Hernandez had competed for Jurupa Valley each of the last three years and also made the postseason in 2024.
But additional national attention and controversy fell on the team this year after Hernandez found himself at the center of a political conflict between President Donald Trump and California Gov. Gavin Newsom at the end of the track season in the spring.
Hernandez reached the women’s state finals in the long jump, triple jump and high jump, prompting Trump to send out a Truth Social post in the days leading up to the event warning Newsom and the state against allowing a trans athlete to compete in the women’s events. Trump signed an executive order to ban schools from allowing biological males to play women’s sports in February, but the California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) has persistently challenged it.
Instead, the CIF changed its rules to grant any female athlete competing in the same events as Hernandez a spot in the competition or a spot higher on the medal podium if they finished behind a biological male athlete.
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Hernández 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.
Then, a month later in July, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against CIF and the California Department of Education for refusing to change their transgender policies to comply with Trump’s executive order “Keep Men Out of Women’s Sports.”
newsom office previously provided a statement to Pak Gazette Digital, referring responsibility for the situation to the CIF, the 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 authority of the Governor. CIF and CDE have stated that they follow existing state law, a law that was passed in 2013 and signed by Governor Jerry Brown (not Newsom) and in line with 21 other states. For the law to change, the legislature would need to send a bill to the Governor. They have not done so,” the statement reads.
On April 1, the California state legislature blocked two bills that would reverse the current law that allows men to participate in women’s sports. All Democrats voted against it, with Assemblyman Rick Chavez Zbur arguing that one of the bills “really reminds me of what happened in Nazi Germany in the 1930s. We are 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 the chamber, according to Republican Assembly member Kate Sanchez.
“She got up and left because she was very upset with the comparison,” Sánchez told Pak Gazette Digital.
No policy changes were made. Hernandez was then allowed to compete as a girl, become a national spectacle, and then play one final season of high school volleyball, prompting protests from opponents and teammates alike.
Two of Jurupa Valley’s senior players, McPherson and Hadeel Hazameh, walked away of the team this season in protest for the trans athlete.
McPherson and Hazameh too filed a lawsuit against the Jurupa Unified School District citing his 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 that lawsuit.
Now that the fall sports season is coming to a close, Hernandez is still eligible to compete in one more season of women’s track and field in the spring.
