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A nationally contentious season came to an end Wednesday night for a high school girls’ volleyball team in California.
Jurupa Valley High School lost their first round state playoff game 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 forfeited off the team’s schedule, and a lawsuit against the school district was filed by two current and one former teammate of Hernandez.
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Transgender player AB Hernandez (4) of Jurupa Valley looks on 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 pressed on with their season and finished as co-champions of the River Valley League, earning a playoff match against Valencia. But it was no typical high school playoff game.
Multiple sources, including board trustee Leandra Blades at the Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified School District, which houses Valencia High School, confirmed to Fox News Digital that at least one of Valencia’s players did not take the court on Wednesday to avoid facing Hernandez.
Then in the stands, multiple women’s sports activists were present, led by California Family Council Outreach Director Sophia Lorey. The activists included local teenage girls, some of whom competed alongside or against Hernandez in the past.
‘Save Girls’ Sports’ protesters gather at a California high school volleyball game involving a trans athlete on Oct. 22, 2025. (Courtesy of Sophia Lorey)
Lorey presented videos to Fox News Digital that showed other spectators at the game heckling the girls in attendance who were there with Lorey.
And for all the pomp and circumstance, it wasn’t even Hernandez’s first playoff volleyball game. Hernandez had competed for Jurupa Valley each of the last three years and went to the postseason in 2024 as well.
But the added national attention and controversy befell 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 track and field season in the spring.
Hernandez made a run to the girls’ state finals in long jump, triple jump and high jump, prompting Trump to send a Truth Social post in the days ahead of the event warning Newsom and the state not to allow a trans athlete to compete in the girls’ events. Trump signed an executive order to prohibit schools from allowing biological males to play in girls’ sports in February, but the California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) has persistently defied it.
Instead, the 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.
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Hernandez went on to take first place in high jump and triple jump, and second place in long jump.
The rule change resulted in Hernandez sharing 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 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.
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.
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.
No policy changes were made. So Hernandez was allowed to compete as a girl, become a national spectacle, and then play out a final high school volleyball season, igniting protests from opponents and teammates alike.
Two of Jurupa Valley’s senior players, McPherson and Hadeel Hazameh, stepped away from the team this season in protest of the trans athlete.
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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.
An now with the fall sports season coming to a close, Hernandez is still eligible to compete in one more girls’ track and field season in the spring.
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