Saquon Barkley wasn’t a basketball star at Whitehall. He was a bowling ball — just like he’s now for the Eagles.

Saquon Barkley knows the lighthearted criticisms of his basketball skills. His former Whitehall High School basketball coach, Jeff Jones, the school’s athletic director, Bob Hartman, and even Penn State football coach James Franklin have remarked over the years about Barkley’s brief career with the Whitehall Zephyrs.

The notes range from “glue guy” to “not a skilled guy” to describing his free-throw shooting as “horrendous.”

Reminded of these earlier this week, and told a reporter would be talking to his former teammate, Chad Rex, Barkley had one request: “Ask Chad about the runs at Stiles Park,” Barkley said.

Stiles Playground is a small park at Fourth and Chestnut Streets in Stiles, Whitehall Township. It was the place, Rex said, where “if it was warm enough to get outside and play basketball, that’s where we were at.”

Franklin once said Barkley would wrongly consider himself a basketball player. Barkley clarified: “I was a hell of a street basketball player.”

Well ...

“He was,” Rex said. “He was a lot to handle. Look at the size of that guy. There were no refs out there. It’s outdoor basketball with the boys, it got chippy. Having a man of that size leaning up on you and throwing his body into you was a lot to handle. He was a killer at Stiles Park for sure.

“He’s known as a football player, but some of the things I’ve seen him do on the basketball court, specifically at Stiles Park, would blow anyone away. Just his explosiveness, dunking the ball.”

Within the structure of varsity basketball, though, Barkley wasn’t a star. He was, however, everything Whitehall needed. He was a bowling ball. He’d roam the back line of Whitehall’s matchup zone and make up for being in the wrong spot by using his athleticism to recover. He grabbed rebounds because, even as a 5-foot-10 or 5-11 forward, he could jump higher than everyone else.

Already a football star, Barkley didn’t join the Zephyrs’ basketball team until his senior year. But he made an instant impact. Whitehall, with Barkley as the glue guy, went on a surprising run to the district final that season. And while basketball wasn’t the most important of Barkley’s three varsity letters — he was a multi-event track athlete as a senior as well — his time playing basketball at Whitehall encapsulated a lot of the person and player behind a historic Eagles season that ends next weekend at the Super Bowl.

“He just fit in so well with everybody because he was so likable,” said Jones, who is still Whitehall’s basketball coach. “When you have a guy who is likable and works as hard as he does, it can’t help but make your team that much better.”

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Whitehall knocked off Nazareth in overtime of the District 11 semifinal in February 2015. But Barkley made just four of his 12 free-throw attempts. So after the game in the locker room, Barkley, despite two of those four makes coming in the overtime session, apologized to Jones for all the misses.

“I said, ‘Saquon don’t apologize because without you we wouldn’t be here,’” Jones said.

“He likes being a great teammate, I think that’s obvious with everything you see now,” said Hartman, the Whitehall AD whose kids Barkley used to babysit. “He cares about his teammates, knew he could add a little bit. He wasn’t on the court to score. He was there to defend and rebound and hustle and he did all that stuff.”

Jones knew Barkley worked hard from observing him in the weight room and seeing him around the school before he joined the basketball program. He heard secondhand about the teammate he was. But he finally got to see it up close for himself when Barkley played basketball, and Barkley’s inquisitive nature might have been the most surprising aspect of it all.

Jones recalled a referee once telling a player who was about to inbound the ball that he had to keep his spot and couldn’t run the baseline. Barkley was never the inbounds passer for the Zephyrs, but he filed it away. After the game, he asked Jones what the referee meant.

“I’ve never had a player ask more questions during the course of a season trying to improve and get better than he did,” Jones said. “He always wanted to improve. He always wanted to learn the game a little bit more. That was something special. A lot of high school kids don’t do that.”

But what about the jump shot?

“It wasn’t good,” Jones said. “It wasn’t awful awful, but it wasn’t good, and he knew it. But that didn’t deter him from working at it. He worked at it and worked at it and worked at it and just wanted to get better for our team.”

Jones saw the work ethic right away, before the season started, in workouts with the Zephyrs.

“He practiced so hard,” Jones said. “He just led by example. He didn’t do anything half-assed. Everything he did was hard and competitive.”

Even after he left Whitehall for Penn State. Barkley once came back to Whitehall during the football season and attended a basketball practice. It was during the weeks leading up to Penn State’s bowl game, and Barkley wanted to get on the court with Jones’ team.

“I’m like, ‘there’s no way you’re doing this workout with us today. If you get hurt, I’m in trouble here,’” said Jones, a Rams fan who was conflicted when Barkley beat his team two weeks ago. “But as soon as that bowl game was over, he came back and completed a workout with us. He went through it like it was the first day of practice for him and he was competing for a spot on the team.”

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Whitehall’s connection to the Super Bowl isn’t a new phenomenon. Before Barkley, there was former Patriots and Broncos center Dan Koppen, who won two with New England, and before him there was Matt Millen, a linebacker who won four Super Bowls with three teams (Oakland, San Francisco, Washington).

Barkley, though, is a bigger star.

“Every time Saquon has done something amazing over the past 10 years, the phones and emails have really taken flight,” Hartman said. “This week is way more intensity.”

It is welcomed attention, to be sure.

“It’s awesome for our community, someone they get to identify with,” Hartman said. “Someone our young kids get to look up to because he does the right things off the field as well.

“It’s amazing. Anybody that said they thought he’d be doing this is probably lying. That’s not to take away from his abilities or those types of things, but he’s one of the best players in the NFL, the most dynamic player in the NFL. It’s pretty amazing. It’s awesome. Surreal.”

Rex is an Eagles diehard. It was cool when Barkley signed with the Eagles because his friend was going to play for his favorite team, but he knew the other stuff Barkley was going to bring. Maybe he wasn’t thinking Super Bowl, but his mind went to Barkley being a perfect fit for an Eagles team that had just suffered a collapse at the end of last season.

“Seeing what that team went through last year and understanding what he brings to a team as a person and a leader, I think it’s something the Eagles needed and maybe back in the day it was something we needed, too,” Rex said. “The same thing you’re seeing him bring to the Eagles as a person, he brought that to our basketball team as well.”

The athleticism wasn’t surprising. Rex saw enough of that at Stiles Park over the years, but even Barkley can provide a few surprises from time to time in that department.

Barkley earlier this season invited Rex and a few other Whitehall friends to the Eagles-Jaguars game on Nov. 3. Early in the second quarter, Barkley caught a third-down pass out in space. He broke a tackle, then another, then, showing off a little, jumped backward over another defender in one of the more impressive plays of the NFL season.

“It’s me and all my high school buddies and Saquon’s family,” Rex said. “There’s just a bunch of people in his suite. Dude, he hit this hurdle and everybody just kind of went silent for a second and looked at each other like, ‘What the hell just happened?’

“It was nuts.”

And this Super Bowl run?

“It’s a privilege really,” Rex said. “It’s been special. My entire family my whole entire life has been diehard Eagles fans through and through. To see a childhood friend not only do what he’s doing but do it on the Eagles has been special for me, my family, our entire community, Whitehall in general. It’s been cool to see, and that boy deserves it.”