Thomas County Central's Austin Bryant chases down the Bainbridge ball carrier during the Yellow Jackets' victoroy earlier this season. 

THOMASVILLE — It takes one signature to make the next step in an 18-year-old’s future.

Most of those signatures will be scribbled on a check as high school seniors begin to make deposits to the school of their choice.

Many will make their signature Wednesday on a letter of intent during national signing day. The act will open the door on a college playing career and close one on the long recruiting process that sometimes lasts for years.

The build up to this one simple signature starts long before the fans, cameras and pen arrive. And for most, whether dreamed of or not, it creates a bit of a shock factor.

Thomas County Central defensive end Austin Bryant will make it official with a signature announcing his intent to play at Clemson, a choice he publicly made back in July before his senior season started. It was 17 years ago that fellow Central alumni Joe Burns scribbled out a signature announcing he would be attending Georgia Tech.

Bryant and Burns both lived out dreams of having colleges around the country clamor for them. But with the drastic difference in technology between nearly two decades, their paths have been paved in different ways.

THE BEGINNING

Burns’ recruitment story starts in the late 1990s with an instruction from coach Ed Pilcher to come into his office. Pilcher sat him down to tell him college coaches were starting to come by and ask about him; His path to college was becoming clearer.

“That was one of the most exciting days of my life,” Burns said during a phone call in September. “And then colleges started calling me directly. I was getting calls from all of the top coaches in the Southeast and just having them come by your house, thinking about my recruiting process, that was the most important part.”

For Burns, and for those who lived near his single-wide trailer, having famous college coaches swing by from schools such as Florida and Georgia was a huge deal.

“I remember, coaches when they came to my house, they used to talk about how the guys in my neighborhood on the corner, they used to stop them and ask them how it was going and things like that,” said Burns, who went on to play four years at running back for the Buffalo Bills from 2002-05. “It was just really cool, I think, for my neighborhood and how I grew up.”

Coaches are no longer simply chatting with locals, they’re finding themselves in the background of fans’ selfies as they make NCAA-approved trips to schools instead of living rooms.

“I’ll be sitting in my sixth-period class — that’s usually when they come ’round — and it’ll be like two or three college coaches waiting to talk to me,” Bryant said. “That was pretty crazy. It was pretty fun getting me out of class, but yea, that was pretty cool.”

As an athlete moves up through the grades, college coaches and recruiters are given more access by NCAA rules. Athletes are allowed to contact coaches on their own, but coaches are not allowed to contact athletes up until the athlete’s junior year, and that includes returning voicemails.

Even the simple act of a phone call has created a different process between Burns and Bryant. In the ’90s families were still restricted by a phone cord, making it a trickier business to get phone time.

“Back then we didn’t have cell phones, so you had to be home when they said they was gonna call,” Burns said. “You couldn’t have the flexibility to be doing what you wanted to do. When they called you, you had to be there to answer the call.”

When an athlete starts his junior year, coaches can start contacting him off campus. Many times, athletes take what are deemed “unofficial visits” before they are seniors. The funding to visit is not provided by the college and athletes can take as many unofficial visits to as many schools as they’d like.

Official visits are only allowed during one’s senior year with an overall cap of five. The college pays for the recruit and his family to come to the school for a maximum 48-hour stay.

Bryant never took an official visit to Clemson before declaring; Burns took one to visit a friend, but made all his other trips as unofficial visits just as Bryant did.

Even without actual trips, recruits today have a much easier time getting a feel for a school thanks to a laptop, smartphone or tablet.

A WHOLE NEW WORLD

Earlier this month, Hyundai announced its newest cars were going to be void of CD players. Instead, occupants will be head-banging and air-guitaring to a bluetooth music system.

It’s simply the first step in getting rid of a piece of old technology, the same way cassette players saw their ultimate demise despite the adoration of mix-tapes that characterized Burns’ high school years.

As vehicles have changed, so have coaches and recruitment.

“Back in the day, especially when my dad was in high school, they had the projector film so the (high school) coaches could bail those out and college coaches had to come to high schools to watch,” Burns said. “Then it got to films, then it got to DVDs, then people started to send DVDs out to colleges. Now it’s internet.”

What used to be a stack of DVDs on a coach’s desk is now likely a bookmarked page on a coach’s web browser. Sites such as maxpreps.com and hudl.com allow a space for recruits to list their vitals, such as their 40-yard dash times, and also upload highlights from games.

“Back in the day, college coaches came on the road and came to visit high school coaches more,” Burns said. “But now they do most of their recruiting from their desk over the internet by looking at kids’ profiles. Before they go out and visit people they evaluate them on their computer.”

Bryant uses 247sports.com, an affiliate of CBS Sports. After his first offer from a college, the site made him a profile. It lists all of the schools that have made offers, along with which ones he had “unofficially” visited, where he went to camps and ultimately which one he chose. It also lists when students have enrolled.

Readily available information goes both ways, a positive change both Burns and Bryant see in the recruiting process.

“A coach can tell you anything to get you to come to their school, but then that information is right there online,” Bryant said. “You can look at their depth chart, their roster, or what kind of graduation rates they have, so it’s pretty good you can tell who’s telling the truth and who’s just giving you fluff.”

Said Burns, “It’s like any other sales person: They’re going to tell you whatever it takes to get you there.”

It didn’t take much to get Burns to Atlanta.

“I ended up going to Georgia Tech and I didn’t know it was an engineering school,” Burns said. “I was solely looking at it from the football aspect of it. I turned down a scholarship from Florida, FSU, South Carolina (and) Central Florida to go to Georgia Tech because they had the same mascot as my high school. That’s what I based my college decision off of.”

Bryant had the advantage of hundreds of thousands of pages of information about Clemson and the other schools making offers, such as Penn State, LSU, South Carolina and Florida. Having the internet at the ready is a big plus for Bryant and his fellow recruits in the 2010s. But it isn’t always beneficial.

YOU HAVE 100 NOTIFICATIONS

Bryant used to wake up to massive mentions on his Twitter timeline. Fans from various Division I programs vying for his attendance would send the soon-to-be-senior tweets wishing him a good morning and a great day at school.

“They hound you on Twitter,” Bryant said. “I know some mornings when I look to check Twitter, I’ll have, like, 20 mentions from fans and stuff trying to get me to come to their school.”

The sign-off was typically the same, Bryant said: “Go Canes” or “Go Tigers.” Basically, “peppy stuff about their school” to sway the recruit to the institution.

Burns never had to deal with that. In fact, the hooplah around recruiting wasn’t there 17 years ago when Burns made his decision.

“Back then, it felt like nobody cared,” he said. “It wasn’t a big deal at all like now … now recruiting is a business of its own.”

Technically it’s against NCAA violations to contact potential recruits on Twitter and sell the school. But it’s a rule that’s rarely enforced, and it didn’t have an impact on Bryant as he made his decision.

“It’s just cool to look at,” he said. “If you have your head on straight, it shouldn’t sway you any which way.”

And Bryant, who answered after a chuckle, said he does think his head is, in fact, on straight.

The real danger in social media doesn’t come from ecstatic fans. It comes from the recruits themselves as they try to navigate a fine line between being a kid and being a responsible, professional young athlete. As with anyone in today’s world, social media can cause big headaches and can even spell the end to a career.

“It used to be a telephone call to their house was about all [coaches] could do,” Central coach Bill Shaver said following a practice last fall. “Now they’ve got all the cell phones and the Twitters and the Facebooks, the Instagrams and all that kind of stuff, so you have to be real careful with all that because you could be doing something that you think is funny and cute and all that, but a coach sees it the wrong way because they don’t know ya.”

The social media horror stories are plenty, pushing some to encourage young people to “tweet like your grandma’s watching.” And not the grandma you want to appall.

INTO THE FUTURE

College recruiting is a vicious battle that’s beginning to see no age limit. Young boys barely beginning to adapt to middle school life are receiving offers to play college football from big-name schools. LSU made headlines with its offer to 15-year-old Dylan Moses from Baton Rouge, Louisiana in 2013, three years after 13-year-old David Sills of Delaware made his commitment to USC.

Signing day 2015 marks exactly five years since Sills made his commitment. Finally a high school senior, Sills will be attending West Virginia. His story isn’t an anomaly and goes to show how little all the offers and commitments mean before the big day.

Burns and Bryant are both happy with their time as recruits, emphasizing how blessed they were to get that opportunity. But both also would like to see some basic changes to the recruiting timeline.

“I think with an earlier signing period, these verbal commitments and offers don’t mean anything,” said Burns, who works with young athletes as a founder of Rising Seniors. “It’s just a verbal offer. It’s not binding from the athlete or the school.”

Burns said he doesn’t like all the offers athletes’ receive since many are false hopes. Coaches are trying to compete with every other school, so offers are given to athletes even if there’s no room on the roster or any spots left at that position. It forces kids to make earlier decisions, Burns said, and if they’re going to make those early verbal decisions it seems right to allow them to make it official.

“I think it’s important to have an early signing period so whenever a kid gets an offer from a school of his dreams, he can go in and accept and sign and be done with it instead of waiting until the end to see what all happens and how everything pans out,” Burns said.

Bryant can be rolled into that category of player. He made his decision early, announced it, and has been all-Clemson since. He tried to attend every home game thanks to supportive parents, but when he couldn’t he made sure to watch his future teammates on TV. Even though he was sure of what he wanted, he wasn’t allowed to take that official visit. Even his trip for a Clemson cook-out in July, where he told coach Dabo Swinney he’d see him on the Clemson field in 2015, was an unofficial visit because Bryant had started senior classes yet.

“Some kids, like me, want to go ahead and get the decision out of the way,” he said. “It just helps clarify the decision more if you’re able to go take those officials that schools can pay for your whole family to come with you.

“Most people want to do it to take stress off them their senior years. Just have fun and focus on their teams and their grades.”

Bryant already enrolled and is deciding on either a health science or communication/journalism major with dreams of being a physical therapist or an ESPN analyst. When he signs his letter of intent Wednesday at 12 p.m., it’ll be the final line on his recruiting process.

“Overall, it’s pretty fun,” Bryant said. “I wish every high school player could experience it, because it’s amazing to think so many schools want you to play football for them. For them to just come at you so hard just to get your signature on a letter of intent, it’s pretty rewarding for all the hard work you put in.”

Burns has turned plenty of pages and chapters in his story since signing his name to become a Georgia Tech Yellow Jacket.

“Nobody knows how hard you’ve worked when you’re by yourself,” Burns said. “That’s something I’ve prided myself on because I wasn’t the most athletic, I wasn’t born with everything. I worked and became a player of the game.”

He retired from the NFL in 2006 and helped co-found Rising Seniors, which helps young athletes make college decisions based not only on its athletic program, but also what they want to do after their college careers.

Most importantly, it helps young men and women deal with the everchanging NCAA landscape: New technology, social media, and whatever comes next.

Cassandra Negley can be reached via email, cassandra.negley@gaflnews.com, and followed on Twitter, @casnegley.