AB Hernandez swept three events at the CIF Southern Section track and field finals in Moorpark, California, on Saturday, and each time, announcers told the crowd the event had two "co-champions." The rule, a CIF pilot program launched last year, grants any female athlete who finishes behind a transgender competitor the right to share the top step of the podium as a joint winner. Hernandez's mother, Nereyda, took to social media afterward to condemn it.
The scene at Moorpark High School captured everything wrong with California's approach to competitive girls' athletics. A governing body that cannot bring itself to set a clear standard instead invented a workaround, one that satisfies no one and, by its own design, declares that the results it certifies are not quite real.
Hernandez, a Jurupa Valley High School athlete who the Daily Mail reported was born male, won the long jump by more than a foot over Moorpark High's Gianna Gonzalez, took the high jump by two inches over Gwnneth Mureika of Oak Park, and reportedly won the triple jump by nearly two feet over Malia Strange of Shadow Hills. Those are commanding margins in any field event. Under normal circumstances, the winner would stand alone at the top of the podium. Under CIF's pilot program, the runner-up stands there too, as a "co-champion."
The results played out differently at each ceremony. In the long jump, Hernandez was absent from the podium, leaving Gonzalez to stand alone on the top step. In the high jump, Hernandez and Mureika stood together. In the triple jump, Hernandez stood alone because Strange was absent.
CIF has not provided a public explanation for the absences. The federation's letter authorizing the rule change was posted online by Rainbow Families Action, a campaign group, but the exact text of the letter has not been published. No direct quote from CIF officials appears in available reporting.
Rainbow Families Action criticized the federation sharply. The group posted that "all these big, tough ex-athletes at CIF, and the most courage they could muster was to hand this to coaches at AB's meet today." The post continued:
"Not one of them was brave enough to look her or her mother in the eye and say: 'This whole project of violating Ed Code is aimed at you. A child.'"
The group did not identify which section of California's Education Code it alleged CIF was violating.
When local and state officials refuse to make hard choices, the fallout lands on the people closest to the problem, in this case, teenage girls and their families. It is a pattern familiar across California, where children's spaces are routinely sacrificed to bureaucratic evasion.
Nereyda, Hernandez's mother, shared a post after the finals that praised her child's performance while condemning the co-champion framework. She wrote:
"Today at the CIF Track & Field Finals, my heart was full watching AB compete."
In a separate post, she added:
"No matter how differently she may be seen by some, she continues to walk onto that field with the most beautiful smile on her face, gives EVERY event her ALL, and carries herself with grace, determination, and sportsmanship."
Nereyda's frustration is understandable on its own terms. The co-champion label implicitly tells her child, and every spectator, that the win carries an asterisk. But the rule exists because CIF created an impossible situation in the first place: it allowed a biologically male athlete into girls' competition, then tried to paper over the competitive gap with a ceremonial fix. The podium rule does not restore fairness. It just broadcasts the problem in real time.
The sharpest voice on the other side belongs to Reese Hogan, a Crean Lutheran High School athlete who went viral roughly twelve months ago with a similar podium protest after finishing behind Hernandez. Hogan took Hernandez's place on the top step that day. This year, she told Fox News Digital she might do it again.
"If the opportunity presents itself, we'll see, yeah."
The opportunity did not quite materialize Saturday. Hogan finished third in the high jump, sixth in the triple jump, and did not make the long jump finals. But earlier in the week, she gave an emotional interview laying out her position plainly.
"This is my third year competing against a transgender athlete, and last year I was stripped of a CIF Title. I basically worked my whole career to get to that point."
She added a line that should haunt every administrator who signed off on this arrangement:
"It's just really disappointing to go into a competition knowing you already lost."
Hogan also stated directly what CIF will not: "I'm here to stand up for girls in girls' sports and to call out CIF and the state of California for their poor leadership and lack of support for female athletes."
When public institutions fail to protect the people they serve, individuals eventually step forward to say what officials will not. It is a dynamic visible well beyond high school sports, from city councils reversing failed policies only under outside pressure to parents demanding accountability wherever children's well-being is at stake.
Consider what the California Interscholastic Federation actually constructed. It allowed transgender athletes to compete in girls' events. When the competitive results became impossible to ignore, it created a pilot program that names two winners for every event a trans athlete wins. The same arrangement, Fox News reported, will be in place for the remainder of the postseason.
Hernandez now advances to next Saturday's CIF preliminaries and has a chance to return to the state finals for a second straight year. Every female athlete who lines up against Hernandez in those events will compete under the same cloud: win or lose, the podium will be rearranged to accommodate a policy contradiction that CIF refuses to resolve.
The co-champion rule does not protect female athletes. It tells them their second-place finish will be relabeled as a tie for first, a participation trophy dressed up in the language of competitive equality. And it does not protect Hernandez, either. It brands every victory as contested before the tape is even broken.
Questions parents across California are rightly asking, about institutional accountability when children are affected, apply here with full force. Who at CIF decided this pilot program was adequate? What specific Education Code provisions govern the policy? Why has no CIF official gone on record to defend or explain the rule in plain language?
None of these questions have public answers. CIF has not provided a direct statement. The letter authorizing the change has been referenced but not quoted. The federation's silence leaves athletes, parents, and coaches to fight it out among themselves, which is, of course, the entire strategy. Avoid a clear ruling, distribute the blame, and hope the controversy burns itself out before anyone in authority has to take a position.
It is the same institutional cowardice that plagues California governance at every level. Officials create conditions they know will generate conflict, then act surprised when families push back. Whether the issue is public safety in Southern California communities or the integrity of girls' high school sports, the pattern is identical: leaders who will not lead, rules designed to avoid accountability, and ordinary people left to absorb the consequences.
Hernandez's mother is angry about the co-champion label. Reese Hogan is angry about competing in a rigged field. The female athletes who stood on shared podiums Saturday, or refused to stand there at all, sent their own message. Everyone involved knows the arrangement is a fiction. The only people pretending otherwise sit in CIF offices.
A governing body that cannot tell a teenage girl whether she won or tied has no business governing anything.
