Virginia Tech football coaches must have wondered what Zack McCray was doing at their one-day camp Saturday in Blacksburg.

He had told them earlier in the week that he would not be attending.

"I wanted to surprise them," said McCray, a 6-foot-4 ½, 240-pound defensive end who is a rising senior at Brookville High School outside Lynchburg.

Actually, McCray had told his parents earlier in the week that he would be making an oral commitment to the Hokies. On Thursday, he told his first cousin and former Brookville teammate Logan Thomas, but made him promise not to tell.

McCray picked the Hokies over a final four that included Alabama, North Carolina and LSU.

"It wasn't so much that Alabama and LSU were too far from home," McCray said, "but it just seemed like I could never get down there for a visit. North Carolina was too deep at defensive end."

McCray's mother and Thomas' mother are sisters, but McCray said his family connection wasn't a factor in his choice of Tech. Thomas signed with the Hokies in February.

"I had thought about committing [to Tech] even before Logan did," McCray said, "but I decided to see what [offers] came in, to play the recruiting game a little bit."

He ended up with more than 20 scholarship offers, some of the early ones from Division I-AA programs but more recently from the likes of UCLA and Stanford. He also was in contact with Oregon.

Thomas has not taken the Scholastic Aptitude Test -- in fact, he first planned to take the SAT on Saturday -- but does not anticipate any qualifying issues. He says he has a 3.6 grade-point average that he hopes to lift to 4.0 as a senior.

He said he made up his mind Sunday, then set about planning his surprise announcement.

"When [defensive coordinator] Bud Foster saw me at the camp today, he stopped the drill he was running," McCray said. "I just snuck up here. They had no clue."

Thomas was rated the No. 2 junior in Virginia by The Roanoke Times and has been named to several lists of the nation's top 100 prospects for the class of 2010.