The Stellar and Sportsfest basketball tournaments are hosted a week apart from one another and are both at Allentown’s Cedar Beach Park. But the two tournaments also have some major differences.

Not only is Sportsfest a round-robin style tournament, but it has a number of different teams from out of the area that are not part of the Stellar girls tournament.

The Parkland girls basketball team ran into one of those quality, out-of-town teams in Central Dauphin East. The Panthers ended the Trojans run in the quarterfinals of the playoffs Sunday with a four-point win. Parkland fell two games shy of making appearances in the championship game of both tournaments back-to-back weekends.

“I thought it was a good weekend for us,” said head coach Wes Spence. “It’s unfortunate we lost when we did, but we were able to play on Sunday, which is always our goal. We were able to get some good play from our girls, and see some different teams than what we did last weekend [at Stellar].”

At Stellar, the Trojans were down a few players due to other commitments, and mostly fielded a team of five or six players over a seven-game weekend. But last weekend, Spence was able to see what he had with a full roster on hand.

“It was great to have a full roster and get all of the girls back,” said Spence. “We were able to get a lot of good play out of a lot of girls.”

With a group stage consisting of four teams, the winner of each group along with a few wild card teams advanced to Sunday’s playoffs.

The Trojans had a strong performance in the group stage, going 3-0.

Opening up on the first night Thursday, Parkland beat Penn Crest 47-24 behind a game-high 18 points from junior Julia Buchman. Parkland was then off until Saturday when it had two games. The Trojans defeated Faith Christian 49-27 and followed that up with a victory over Freedom 43-36. Devyn Anderson had 14 in the win against Faith Christian, and Emily Piston tallied 14 versus the Patriots.

“We had a balanced offense in most of our games, which was nice to see,” Spence said. “We want the girls to move the ball around and look for the open shot.”

The Trojans took down Pocono Mountain East bright and early Saturday morning in their first playoff game 42-27. But later that day, they lost a close one in a low-scoring affair against CD East 26-22.