“My wife (Stacey) spoke with him Friday also. He said he was doing a little better. That’s why we can’t figure out what went wrong.”

The baseball team and Sickles’ parents gathered Sunday night at head coach Bryce Darnell’s home. Brian Sickles told the team Danny would be buried in Florida wearing his Missouri Southern uniform and with the baseball his teammates signed.

“We came up (Sunday), and I can’t believe how nice everybody has treated us,” Brian said. “People in the hotel, then coming over here to Coach’s house, it’s been unbelievable. Everybody has been so supportive, helped us try to get through this. It definitely helps.”

“This is so unthinkable,” Darnell said. “It’s more unthinkable from a parents’ standpoint. My heart aches for Danny’s parents and Danny’s two brothers. We’ll do the best we can in terms of grieving with Danny’s family.”

Hernandez played baseball with and against Sickles in Orlando and recruited him to Missouri Southern.

“I called him all summer. I got in contact with Coach Darnell a lot over the summer,” Hernandez said. “It took a little pulling and pushing. We worked out a lot together over the summer, and every time I’d talk to him ... ‘You should come up. It’s nice.’ I didn’t tell him about the weather. ... He hasn’t been real happy with me over this winter, but the big thing was he wanted to play somewhere he knew somebody. We’ve competed at a pretty high level together in Florida, so it was good for both of us.”

“One thing I remember is he hates the weather,” Darnell said. “That’s the Florida blood in him.”

“When we came up here, it was 104 the first day we got here,” Brian Sickles said. “So it was hotter than Florida. But I told him it was going to be cold. When we moved to Florida, he was 6 years old. He didn’t remember what it’s like to be in the cold.”

Danny Sickles was not a bookworm, but his father marveled at his son’s ability to retain information.

“He was like a genius to me,” Brian Sickles said. “He would never pick up a book or study very rarely, but every bit of information stayed in his head. He always did good on tests and in school, and he never really had to study.

“He was a real bright kid who had a real bright future, in baseball or whatever it would have been. He was going to try to be an accountant, and he would have been successful in that, too.”

Globe reporter Joe Hadsall contributed to this story.