The three University of Virginia football players killed in an on-campus shooting on Sunday were remembered by their head coach as “incredible young men with huge aspirations and extremely bright futures.”

Devin Chandler, Lavel Davis Jr., and D’Sean Perry were juniors returning to campus from a class trip Sunday night when authorities say they were killed by a fellow student identified as Petersburg High School graduate and former UVA football player Christopher Darnell Jones Jr.

The young men were journeying through periods of transition in their careers — whether it was bouncing back from a season-ending injury, changing positions on the team or transferring in from another school.

“They touched us, inspired us and worked incredibly hard,” head football Coach Tony Elliott said in a statement.

Mr. Chandler was a second-year University of Virginia student from Virginia Beach and a wide receiver and kick returner for the UVA Cavaliers football team.

Mr. Davis Jr. was a third-year student from Ridgefield, S.C. preparing to graduate in December, and a wide receiver for the team.

Mr. Perry was a fourth-year student from Miami and a line- backer and defensive end for the team.

Two other students — identified by various news outlets as Marlee Morgan, and UVA running back Michael Hollins — also were hospitalized with serious injuries on Monday.

In an email, Eric Swensen, public information officer for UVA said “one patient is being discharged from the medical center Tuesday; the other patient is in serious condition.” He would not confirm the surviving students’ identities.

The Associated Press reported that a family spokesperson for Mr. Hollins said that his condition was improving after a second operation on Tuesday.

In a press conference on Monday, University of Virginia police chief Tim Longo said the police arrived on the scene of the crime after receiving a call around 10:30 p.m. that shots had been fired on campus. The campus was immediately placed on lockdown, with students huddling in classroom closets and dorm rooms as a manhunt ensued, according to reports.

UVA President Jim Ryan confirmed that the students involved in the shooting were on a charter bus with fellow classmates returning from a field trip to see a play in Washington, D.C. when the incident occurred.

According to the Washington Post, most in the group didn’t know Mr. Jones, who’d briefly played football himself in 2018. Although Mr. Jones wasn’t in their class focused on African-American playwrights, he’d been invited along by their professor because he was taking a social justice class with her, said Ryan Lynch, a 19-year-old neuroscience major.

Mr. Jones, 22, sat apart in the theater as the two dozen or so students watched a Mosaic Theater Company play about Emmett Till, whose young life was cut short by racial violence, the Post reported.

Upon arriving back on UVA’s campus, Mr. Jones started shooting, seemingly aiming at specific people, and one witness reported that he shot one of the football players as he slept, a prosecutor said in court Wednesday.

After a 12-hour search on Monday, the accused, Mr. Jones, was apprehended by law enforcement in Henrico County. He has been charged with three counts of second degree murder, three counts of using a handgun in the commission of a felony and two counts of malicious wounding.

On Tuesday, Coach Elliott and Director of Athletics Carla Williams said during a press conference that their primary focus was caring for members of the football team as they navigated their collective grief one day at a time.

The grief felt by the loss of student-athletes Chandler, Davis and Perry extended beyond the university campus.

Former UVA football player Eric Clay, ’89, said there is a mix of emotions being felt by the alumni and friends of the university. “I am hearing that people don’t want to ever see this again — that they are asking ‘What can we do to make sure that this never happens again?’”

This sentiment was echoed by UVa. Professor John Edwin Mason. While there is understandably much attention given to the young men who were murdered, Mr. Mason said there is also grief in the family of the shooter.

“For a lot of us there is grief for the killer as well,” he said. “What happened to that young man, you wonder, who, at one time, showed so much promise?”

Mr. Clay said he has a son that is close to the same age of the victims. A graduate of Varina High School, where the accused shooter attended school from ninth to 11th grade, Mr, Clay said the grief and loss of these once promising lives is rippling through all of the communities these young men came from. “I’m numb, I’m frustrated, I’m angry,” he said. “I want to remain hopeful that there can be some solutions to mental health and gun violence, and I just hope we don’t become desensitized to this.”

When asked, during the press conference, how he was personally coping, Mr. Elliott, whose one-year anniversary as UVA head coach is in December, responded: “It feels like it is a nightmare to be honest with you, and I’m ready for somebody to pinch me, wake me up and tell me this didn’t happen.”

James Harris, a professional counselor and advocate working to end the stigma surrounding mental health, said in an email, “It’s important to ‘feel your feelings’ — something I say to all MEN.” He continued: “Oftentimes they feel it’s only OK to show two emotions, happiness and sadness — but there are others that will help you process.”

During the often-tearful press conference, Coach Elliott’s described the slain football players as “beautiful individuals.”

In speaking about Mr. Chandler, he said, “He was what you wanted at this level. He was just a big kid, had a smile all the time, loved to dance and loved to sing; loved to compete, even though the guys revealed he was not very good at video games but thought he was. Loved to compete. He was just happy with where he was, comfortable in his skin, and just had a bubbly personality.”

Mr. Davis, he said, often wore a “big smile, had a gentleness about him, but was passionate about what he believed in. (He) would do anything for his teammates.”

Mr. Perry, Coach Elliot continued, “was very, very, very artistic, could draw, could shape pots with clay, loved music and was very, very cultured and well-rounded. Just a great teammate and his sense of humor one of a kind.”

Like Mr. Clay, Mr. Mason said he hoped this tragedy will bring attention to the need for more attention to be paid to mental health and a reduction of gun violence. But he is not that optimistic.

“I don’t understand this country’s obsession with guns and why we can’t get over it,” he said. “But unfortunately, if the killing of elementary school students in Uvalde, Texas, does not prompt a change in our attitude about guns, then, unfortunately, I doubt that the death of three young, promising Black men will either.”

Ms. Lynch, who transferred to UVA from Hampton University, according to the Washington Post, said she has been haunted by the image of her friends — Lavel, D’Sean and Devin — as they lay bleeding on the bus.

“They were so caring and amazing to me, to everyone in that class,” she said in the Washington Post article. “The one thing that gives me comfort is I know each one of them had somebody in our class trying to help them. I want their families to know that. In their last moments, they weren’t alone.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.