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The Jurupa Valley High School girls volleyball team in California has lost at least 10 games from its 2025 schedule 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 varsity game on Monday, marking its second loss to JVHS this season. Patriot High School previously lost a Sept. 26 game to Jurupa Valley.
Maribel Muñoz, the mother of Jurupa Valley player Alyssa McPherson, provided Pak Gazette Digital with a copy of a message sent by JVHS head coach Liana Manu announcing that 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 Pak Gazette Digital that Patriot High School’s varsity team did not play its Monday game against Jurupa Valley, while the JV and freshman teams did play.
Jurupa Valley High School girls volleyball players Hadeel Hazameh and Alyssa McPherson say they will not compete as long as there is a trans athlete on their team. (Courtesy of Jessica Tapia)
The Bears lost to Jurupa Valley after the two teams met in the consolation round of a neutral tournament over the weekend. That game is currently listed as lost on high school sports tracking website MaxPreps. The schools have not provided any official reason for the losses.
Pak Gazette Digital reached out to the Jurupa Unified School District, which is home to Jurupa Valley and Patriot High School, and the Chaffey Joint Union High School District, which is home to Los Osos, for a response.
“Patriot will lose the varsity team but they will play lower levels. We expected it,” Manu’s text message said.
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 the league and in first place heading into the final game of the regular season. Jurupa Valley will take on Norte Vista High School on Wednesday with a chance to clinch first place heading into the playoffs. JVHS already beat Norte Vista 3-2 in their first meeting on October 1st.
Meanwhile, Patriot High School and Los Osos join Southern California high school girls volleyball teams in Riverside Poly, Orange Vista, Rim of The World, AB Miller, Yucaipa, Aquinas and San Dimas in declining to face Jurupa Valley this season. None of those schools have provided any official reason for the losses.
Two of Jurupa Valley’s senior players, McPherson and Hadeel Hazameh, walked away from the team this season in protest of fellow 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 the previous three seasons. McPherson’s older sister and former JVHS girls volleyball player, Madison McPherson, is the third plaintiff in that lawsuit.
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Jurupa Valley is ready to play in the postseason, where the losses can continue. Last season, the girls’ volleyball team at a Christian high school in Northern California, 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 medal podium in the long jump 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, although with much less attention and controversy than this year.
Hernandez then attracted national attention in the spring during a highly publicized run to the state championships in women’s track and field. The trans athlete took first place in the women’s high jump and triple jump after President Donald Trump sent out a Truth Social post warning California not to allow a trans athlete to compete in 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 give any female athlete competing in the same events as Hernandez a spot in the meet or a spot higher on the medal podium if they finished behind a biological 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 suit against CIF and the California Department of Education a month later, in July, for refusing to change their transgender policies to comply with Trump’s executive order “Keep Men Out of Women’s Sports.”
California Governor Gavin Newsom’s office previously provided a statement to Pak Gazette Digital, shifting responsibility for the situation to the 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 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.
AB Hernández 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 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.
In July, Newsom spoke about the issue in an interview on the “The Shawn Ryan Show” saying he has been “incredibly frustrated by this” and regularly encounters parents angry about state policies at their children’s soccer games.
“All the parents that come in are like, ‘It’s so unfair.’ Like, ‘Wow,’ like everywhere I went, progressive-minded people, not bigots, who are champions of trans politics like me, but didn’t like sports. They said, ‘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, and even recalled an alleged conversation with Trump about it.
“And now he’s suing us and threatening us, and they’re just, and you know, I’m the model,” Newsom added. “But I do think we have to address that issue.”
