Key Points

  • The Fifth Appellate District held that primary assumption of the risk was a viable defense for a coach sued over an injury in a voluntary, selective basketball physical education class.
  • The court found the class was an extension of the school's extracurricular basketball program, and it distinguished Nigel B. v. Burbank Unified School District as resting on involuntary participation in a mandatory P.E. class.
  • The court called the "during school hours" reasoning in Hemady v. Long Beach Unified School District arguably dicta and unpersuasive.
  • The court held the trial court properly instructed the jury with CACI No. 471's intent-or-recklessness option, and it described the instruction's increased-risk option as an overbroad and incomplete paraphrase of Eriksson v. Nunnink.
  • The court found Greener v. M. Phelps, Inc. inapposite because that decision was limited to combat or grappling sports in which the instructor gave no demonstration or instruction.

A California appeals court ruled that a coach who broke a 12-year-old's wrist while blocking his shot in a school physical education class could not be held liable for ordinary negligence, because the student had volunteered for a selective basketball class that functioned as an extension of the school's team program.

The Fifth Appellate District affirmed jury verdicts for the Clovis Unified School District and coach Phil King. Justice Sandhu wrote the opinion, and Presiding Justice Hill and Justice Detjen joined it. The opinion, filed Sept. 23, was certified for publication Oct. 21.

The decision applies primary assumption of the risk, a doctrine that relieves a defendant of any duty to protect a participant from risks inherent in a sport, so that a student suing a coach must prove intentional or reckless conduct. The panel made the student's voluntary enrollment, rather than the class's place in the curriculum, the key factor, and it faulted a pattern jury instruction used in suits against coaches.

Joseph Yzaguirre was a seventh grader on the junior varsity team at a Clovis Unified intermediate school in fall 2022. He enrolled in a class that witnesses called "Basketball PE," which students could take instead of general physical education. The class was not in the course catalog, required a counselor's and a coach's permission, and was reserved for current and aspiring junior varsity and varsity players. King and Adrian Wiggins, coaches at a high school on the same campus, taught it.

On Dec. 23, 2022, King contested Yzaguirre's shot during a free-time shootaround, and the boy suffered a broken wrist. Yzaguirre testified that King approached from his "blind side … and karate-chopped [his] arm while trying to block [the] shot." King testified that he was guarding the boy face to face and blocked the ball with an outstretched hand.

Yzaguirre, through a guardian ad litem, sued King for battery and negligence and sought to hold the district liable as King's employer. At a trial from June 16 to July 1, 2025, Fresno County Superior Court Judge D. Tyler Tharpe allowed the defense to rely on primary assumption of the risk over Yzaguirre's objection.

Jurors voted 9-3 that King had neither intended to injure the boy nor acted recklessly outside the range of ordinary coaching, and they unanimously rejected the battery claim. Yzaguirre appealed after his new-trial motion failed.

On appeal, Yzaguirre argued that the doctrine could not apply to a curricular class. He relied chiefly on Nigel B. v. Burbank Unified School District, a 2023 Second Appellate District decision that declined to apply the doctrine to touch football in a mandatory eighth-grade P.E. class, where a jury had awarded $1.75 million.

Sandhu wrote that Nigel B. "was based less on the curricular context in which the injury occurred and more on the fact of involuntary participation." Yzaguirre's class, by contrast, "was neither open to all students nor mandatory for any student," the opinion said.

"For all or nearly all practical purposes, Basketball PE was an extension of the school's extracurricular basketball program," Sandhu wrote. King testified that seventh graders in the class ran the same offense and defenses as the high school players, in what he called "a program, 7 through 12."

The panel also rejected Yzaguirre's reliance on Hemady v. Long Beach Unified School District, a 2006 decision involving a seventh grader struck with a golf club in a P.E. golf class. Hemady's statement that ordinary negligence governs injuries "during school hours" was "arguably dicta," meaning unnecessary to the decision, and "not persuasive," Sandhu wrote.

A rule based on the technically curricular nature of an activity "would unduly emphasize form over substance," the court held. "If school districts and coaches were to face heightened liability exposure for team practices conducted during school hours, but less exposure for the exact same activities taking place outside of those hours, the daytime programs would either be discontinued or diluted," Sandhu wrote.

The panel then turned to CACI No. 471, the Judicial Council's pattern jury instruction for claims against coaches and instructors. Option 1 asks whether the coach intended injury or acted recklessly. Option 2 asks whether the coach "unreasonably increased the risks" to the plaintiff beyond those inherent in the sport. Yzaguirre argued that Tharpe should have given Option 2.

The original 2003 version of the instruction, then numbered CACI No. 409, used an increased-risk standard, the opinion recounted. The Judicial Council replaced that standard in April 2004 with intent-or-recklessness language, primarily in response to the California Supreme Court's decision in Kahn v. East Side Union High School District. The council added the increased-risk alternative in 2012, renumbered the instruction in 2017 and revised it in December 2025, while the appeal was pending.

The 2012 alternative rested on the council's reading of Eriksson v. Nunnink, a 2011 wrongful-death case against a riding coach. Sandhu wrote that Option 2's wording "is in essence an overbroad and incomplete paraphrasing of the holding in Eriksson." That case addressed coaches who let physically unfit students participate or let students use unsafe equipment, the opinion said, while Yzaguirre's case involved "no alterations to the basic parameters of the game of basketball."

Yzaguirre had compared his case to Greener v. M. Phelps, Inc., a 2024 decision in which a divided Fourth Appellate District panel upheld the use of Option 2 at a trial where a jury awarded $46 million to a Brazilian jiujitsu student injured while sparring with his instructor. Sandhu called Greener "manifestly inapposite" because its majority limited the holding to "combat or grappling sports when an instructor engages in the activity while not providing any demonstration or instruction."

Option 1 fit Yzaguirre's own theories, the court held. His "karate chop" allegation was a claim of intentional harm, and his testimony that King "just came out of nowhere" went to recklessness. "If true—and three jurors evidently believed it was—King's behavior arguably rose to the level of conduct 'entirely outside the range of ordinary activity involved in teaching or coaching' basketball," Sandhu wrote.

Lyndsie N. Russell of Miles, Sears & Eanni represented Yzaguirre. Anthony N. DeMaria of DeMaria Law Firm represented the district and King.

The panel affirmed the judgment and ordered that the district and King recover their costs on appeal.