Jurupa Valley High School’s girls’ volleyball team has now seen at least 10 games on its 2025 schedule forfeited amid a national controversy involving one of its players, who is transgender. The team’s 2025 schedule also includes matches against Los Osos and Patriot High Schools, which have also forfeited games against Jurupa Valley this season. 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.
A California school board president close to the situation confirmed that the Patriot High School varsity team did not play its Monday game against Jurupa Valley, while the JV and freshman teams did play. Los Osos high school 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.
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, have 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.
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. 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.