Former Panther Creek High boys basketball coach L.J. Hepp was boarding a bus with his Oita HeatDevils professional basketball team for a practice when he learned that a tsunami had hit near Sendai, Japan, about 650 miles north of Oita, which is located on the island of Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan's four main islands.

"We were far enough away that we did not feel the earthquake," Hepp said in an e-mail last week. "All of the players were on their phones with family and friends from the northern areas of Japan and luckily everyone that our team knew was fine."

Early Saturday morning, Hepp learned the BJ League had canceled all games. The next morning Hepp and his team gathered at a mall in Oita to ask for donations.

"It was amazing how generous the Japanese people were in donating," he said. "We collected 1 million Japanese yen [about $12,000 U.S.] in five hours and are sending it to the Red Cross in Tokyo."

Hepp doesn't know when his team, which is 16-22 and has 14 games left, will resume playing. Sendai has a team in the league, but that team is unlikely to finish the season.

"We are still in a bit of a holding pattern waiting to hear from the BJ League office regarding the remainder of the season," he said.

"We are scheduled to play at Sendai in April, and we feel very lucky that we were not there on Friday - we easily could have been. Sendai's team had fortunately already traveled earlier on Friday for an away trip so they were out of town by the time the earthquake occurred."

Hepp said coaching in Japan has been a great experience. He started the Panther Creek program and coached it for three seasons before he left to become the director of basketball operations at the University of South Carolina.

"Getting five players that speak different languages to play together as a unit has been the major challenge," Hepp said. "Our team interpreter is good, which helps, and our Japanese players are extremely coachable."