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Jurupa Valley High School’s girls’ volleyball team in California has now seen at least 10 games on its 2025 schedule forfeited amid a national controversy involving one of its players, who is transgender.
Los Osos High School forfeited a tournament game against Jurupa Valley on Saturday, while Patriot High School forfeited its Monday varsity match, marking its second forfeit to JVHS this season. Patriot High School previously forfeited a Sept. 26 match to Jurupa Valley.
Maribel Munoz, the mother of Jurupa Valley player Alyssa McPherson, provided Fox News Digital a copy of a message sent by JVHS head coach Liana Manu, announcing that the varsity match against Patriot was forfeited. The JV and freshman games were still played.
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A California school board president close to the situation also confirmed to Fox News Digital that the Patriot High School 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 won’t compete as long as a trans athlete is on their team. (Courtesy of Jessica Tapia)
Los Osos forfeited to Jurupa Valley after the two teams were matched up in the consolation round of a neutral tournament over the weekend. That game is currently logged as a forfeit on the high school sports tracking website MaxPreps. No official reason for the forfeits has been provided by the schools.
Fox News Digital reached out to Jurupa Unified School District, which houses Jurupa Valley and Patriot High School, and the Chaffey Joint Union High School District, which houses Los Osos, for a response.
“Patriot will be forfeiting varsity but lower levels will be playing. We already expected it,” Manu’s text message read.
Patriot High School shares a league and school district with JVHS, and by forfeiting for the second time this season, it keeps Jurupa Valley a perfect 9-0 in league play and in first place going into the final game of the regular season. Jurupa Valley will face Norte Vista High School on Wednesday with a chance to clinch first place going into the playoffs. JVHS has already beaten Norte Vista 3-2 in their first meeting on Oct. 1.
Meanwhile, Patriot High School and Los Osos join fellow southern California high school girls’ volleyball teams at Riverside Poly, Orange Vista, Rim of The World, AB Miller, Yucaipa, Aquinas and San Dimas in refusing to face Jurupa Valley this season. No official reason for the forfeits has been provided by any of those schools.
Two of Jurupa Valley’s senior players, McPherson and Hadeel Hazameh, stepped away from the team this season in protest of trans teammate AB Hernandez.
McPherson and Hazameh have 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 poised to play in the postseason, where forfeits may continue. Last season, a Christian high school girls’ volleyball team in northern California, Stone Ridge Christian, forfeited a playoff game to San Francisco Waldorf, which had a trans athlete on its team.
AB Hernandez shares the long jump second-place spot on the medal podium with a female competitor at the California state track and field championship. (Courtesy of Beth Bourne)
Jurupa Valley won their league with Hernandez on its team in 2024, albeit with far less attention and controversy than this year.
Hernandez then garnered national attention in the spring during a highly-publicized run to the state girls’ track and field championships. The trans athlete took first place in the girls’ high jump and triple jump after President Donald Trump sent a Truth Social post warning California not to allow a trans athlete to compete in the girls’ 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 to Hernandez a spot in the competition or one 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 in second place in the long jump.
The U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against the CIF and California Department of Education a month later in July for refusing to change its transgender policies to comply with Trump’s “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” executive order.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office previously provided a statement to Fox News Digital, deferring responsibility for the situation to the CIF, CDE and state legislature.
“CIF is an independent nonprofit that governs high school sports. The California Department of Education is a separate constitutional office. Neither is under the Governor’s authority. CIF and the CDE have stated 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 the Governor a bill. They have not,” the statement read.
AB Hernandez shares the first-place spot on the triple jump podium at the California track and field state championship with a female competitor. (Courtesy of Beth Bourne)
On April 1, the California state legislature blocked two bills that would reverse the current law which allows males in girls’ sports. Every Democrat voted against it, with Assembly member Rick Chavez Zbur arguing that one of the bills “is really reminiscent to me of what happened in Nazi Germany in the 1930s. We are moving towards autocracy in this country. In Nazi Germany, transgender people were persecuted, barred from public life.”
Zbur said this while in the presence of a descendant of a holocaust survivor, who had to excuse herself from the chamber, according to GOP Assembly member Kate Sanchez.
“She stood up and left because she was just so disgusted with the comparison,” Sanchez told Fox News Digital.
In July, Newsom spoke about the issue in an interview on the “Shawn Ryan Show,” saying he has been “amazingly frustrated by it” and that he regularly encounters parents who are angry about the state’s policies at his children’s soccer games.
“Every parent coming up says, ‘It’s so unfair.’ Like ‘Whoa,’ like everywhere I went, progressively-minded people, not bigots, that are champions of trans policy like I am, but didn’t like the sports. They were like ‘Come on man, you got to figure this out,’” Newsom said.
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Newsom added that his allies in the LGBTQ caucus were “furious” with him after he made his initial comments in March while speaking to Kirk, and even recalled an alleged conversation with Trump about it.
“And now he’s suing and threatening us, and they’re just, and you know, I’m the poster child,” Newsom added. “But I do think we have to address that issue.”
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