The two regular season meetings between Parkland and Nazareth were pretty lopsided. The Blue Eagles won the first meeting, which was on their court, by a 41-21 score. Last week, Nazareth came to Parkland's home court and the Lady Trojans played what may have been their best game of the season in beating Nazareth 44-24.

With those two meetings in the past, there was no telling what would happen when the two teams met in the quarter-finals of the Eatern Pennsylvania Conference Tournament. Unfortunately for Parkland, the game was at Nazareth, which came into the tournament seeded third, and things didn't go as well for Parkland as they did last week, resulting in a 49-38 win for Nazareth.

The loss eliminates Parkland (11-6, 14-9) from the tournament, but does give the Trojans' some extra time to prepare for the District 11 Tournament that begins next Tuesday.

Samantha O'Keefe and Emily Piston led the Lady Trojans with eight points each. Tessa Brugler scored 14 for Nazareth (13-4, 17-5) and Lauren Kresge had two big three-pointers in the third quarter to help Nazareth start to pull away.

"They shot the ball better tonight," said Parkland head coach Wes Spence. "They had a couple of spurts in the second half where they pushed the lead to six or eight points and had us playing from behind.

"Their half-court pressure also bothered us more tonight than it did last week. I don't have any good reason for that, other than that they did a better job of getting their hands on passes and getting deflections and that made it difficult on us to return the ball and move it side-to-side."

While Nazareth shook off its weak performance that led to the 20-point loss at Parkland last week, the Lady Trojans couldn't get on to the same track that they were in that win.

"Last week, we shot nearly 50 percent and I haven't looked, but I would say we shot somewhere between 30 and 33 percent from the floor [in the playoff game]," said Spence. "So you combine them making more shots, us not making as many shots and us not taking care of the ball and that's the way it ends up.

"I thought our girls played really fantastic. It was much more competitive than the first time that we were up there, but unfortunately, we didn't do some of the things as effectively tonight as we did last Tuesday."

Spence and his team won't know who they'll play in districts until Sunday, but the added time to practice figures to be put to good use.

For Spence, it's all a matter of finding ways to get back to doing the things that made his team successful during the regular season.

After a bit of a slide, Parkland was playing some of its best basketball coming down the stretch of the EPC regular season. Even though it made an early exit from the EPC Tournament, there's reason to believe that Parkland could be one of the dark horses in district play.

"The approach is that you go in to win, that's why you come to play," said Spence. "I'm sure that all of the teams that qualify go in thinking that they have a chance to be the champion and we're no different.

"We'll start to take a look at things that we did well this season and at things where we struggled and make sure that we're finding ways to improve those areas that we've identified where we need to do better. We'll look to find ways to accentuate our strengths and put ourselves in position to use those strengths as we get into districts."