Jeremy Lin is an NBA star now, but he was overlooked by every college but Harvard when he came out of high school six years ago. (AP)

Bill Holden is now the basketball coach at the Middlesex School in Concord. Six years ago, he was a Harvard assistant coach under Frank Sullivan checking out high school talent at a tournament in Las Vegas when he spotted a skinny kid from the San Francisco area named Jeremy Lin.

Fortunately for Holden and Harvard, what happened in Vegas stayed in Vegas, as no other Division 1 school offered Lin a scholarship despite a performance that convinced Holden to make Lin the team’s top recruiting target that year.

Lin, of course, has gone on to become the darling of New York City, turning around the Knicks with an unforgettable month. But six years ago, he couldn’t even get Harvard to bite on first glance.

Here’s how Holden remembers it:

“As far as Ivy League recruiting goes, in the summertime we have a list of kids that we know that have good grades and we need to check them off our list. Jeremy is someone who had sent out a typical recruiting type questionnaire to probably all of the Ivy League coaches — probably sent from his high school coach, so his name was on our list.

“The first opportunity we got to see him play was in Las Vegas. I was covering the West Coast for coach Sullivan. He was more my responsibility to get to see him. The first time I got to see him play, it was in a game that was very noncompetitive, the environment wasn’t good for an evaluation, the other team wasn’t very strong. Jeremy’s team didn’t play particularly well, either, so it wasn’t a well-played game. And he didn’t do anything that really stood out.

“By taking the eye test and looking at Jeremy, you don’t see someone at 6-1 — and if he was 160 pounds at the time, I’d be shocked. I know he’s up to 205 or whatever he is now, but going into his senior year [of high school], he was lucky if he was 6-1, 155 pounds. It just didn’t look like he had some sort of special gift that would land you in Division 1, whether it’s being a dead-eye shooter, a solid point guard, being able to rebound, play defense or a tremendous scorer. None of those things really stood out.

“Two days later I happened to be in another Las Vegas gym observing a game on one court and it’s not a good evaluation, I’m done with it very quickly. I go into the other gym to see what’s going on and Jeremy’s team is now playing I believe the Baltimore Select or some team that is of a high caliber, athleticism, they had several Division 1 talents on the team. And now Jeremy is a totally different player. His game has gone to a whole new level. He was defending guys on the ball and keeping guys in front of him full court. He was taking guys off the dribble and getting into the lane and scoring on them. And his competitiveness just rose a hundred times from what I’d seen two days before. Just seeing his overall energy and enthusiasm to play hard was just a dramatic difference in a 48-hour period.”

Holden quickly understood that Lin needed to be challenged to show what he was capable of accomplishing.

“Some of the plays he was making were high-level-caliber plays,” Holden said. “And the thing about Jeremy is he has this ability to be able do things that can’t be coached. You can teach guys to shoot, you can teach guys to dribble or pass or play defense or read screens or come off of a screen, but you can’t teach basketball instincts. Jeremy has a high-level basketball IQ, and those are the things you can’t teach. You can get the guy into your program and teach him how to do the other things, but the things I’ve seen him do, I knew he would always have with him and I knew that he would be a good player in the Ivy League.”

While Holden was sold on Lin, the player was pleased with the interest but hoping for something more. And despite the fact that Lin led Palo Alto High School to a state championship over a much bigger and more highly regarded squad from perennial Southern California powerhouse Mater Dei, Lin still couldn’t get a Division 1 scholarship offer.

“He wasn’t fully committed in the sense that he was certainly holding out for the highest level, like most young kids do,” Holden said. “He thought Harvard was definitely a good option for him. And I know his family was certainly excited about it and his coach was excited about it. But having grown up down the street from Stanford and having a little bit of an ego and the desire to play at the highest level, he was still holding out for Stanford.”

Holden only had the opportunity to coach Lin one season before Tommy Amaker took over the Crimson with his own staff. Lin didn’t play much as a freshman on a team that was loaded with upperclassmen in the backcourt.

“Jeremy came in and he did not have the work ethic he has now,” Holden said. “He learned that over the course of his career at Harvard. He learned how to play defense. He became a little more committed as time went on when he realized the things he had to do to get on the court. And looking back, it may have been the best thing for him that he didn’t play every minute of every game of his college career.”

Boston College coach Steve Donahue was turning around the program at Cornell when Lin began matriculating at Harvard.

“He was a good student, a good player, and, yeah, it’s amazing what he was doing,” Donahue said in a recent interview with The New York Times. “But he didn’t look that athletic and he didn’t shoot it all that well. Even after his freshman year at Harvard, you didn’t give it a second thought that we made it a mistake.”

After leaving Harvard, Holden kept watching his prized recruit, watching him blossom into a standout as an upperclassman.

“I think it was his junior year I saw them play Boston College. I was sitting in the front row, and he absolutely took over that game. He dominated BC. They just had no answer for him,” Holden said. “From that day going forward, it was like this kid might be able to do anything — go to the highest level. In his senior year he did the same thing to BC and then drops 30 on UConn, and the sky’s the limit.”

Although he had confidence in Lin, Holden said he couldn’t possibly have predicted his success in the NBA. In six games as a starter with the Knicks over the past two weeks, Lin is averaging 24.3 points and 9.5 assists while shooting 51 percent from the field. Among the many clutch shots he’s already hit, he had a game-winning 3-pointer against the Raptors with less than a second remaining.

“I thought he could be a solid backup point guard, play 10-15 minutes behind someone, maybe play a quarter or a half where he would come in and create energy and create a spark and make some steals and push the ball up the court and find some shooters,” Holden said. “But certainly not the impact he’s having in this past week where he’s averaging 27 a game. … I don’t think he ever had a stretch of five games where he averaged 27 a game ever in his career at any level. To see him doing it in the NBA is just off the charts.”

Holden has stayed in touch with Lin mainly through text messages, but “mostly when I’ve contacted him it’s been at times when things haven’t been so good — trying to keep him motivated and keep him up and realize that maybe something better is going to happen down the road, certainly not knowing that this would be what would happen.”

This past week, Holden finally was able to send Lin some congratulatory texts.

“I just told him, ‘You’re making me awfully popular again, keep it up. Keep plowing forward,’ ” Holden said. “I told the story to my high school team that I beat him a game of one-on-one his freshman year. I told him in a text message that I don’t think my team believed me. He got a good laugh out of that.”

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