I know I’m late to the party, but Happy New Year! And Happy New Decade too!

The naughties have given way to the teens, the second decade of this 21st century of the Common Era. And with it, new opportunities rise for sports in Orlando.

The Amway Center is opening this fall. Hopefully it will come with the raising of a Magic NBA Championship banner.

With that, Amway Arena will close shortly before. And it will close the way it was imagined to: with an Orlando Predators game. And maybe, hopefully, an ArenaBowl will be the last event held there.

The Tuskers will return in 2010. And they will be playing on FieldTurf whether they like it or not.

The Kraze, the Surge and Orlando F.C. will play their developmental amateur soccer in Sanford beginning this spring.

But it all starts this Friday when a new sport, indoor lacrosse, takes the stage with the Orlando Titans.

We in Orlando have always embraced minor-leaguer teams and alternative sports. From our myriad pro football teams (the Panthers of the CPFL, the Renegades of the USFL, the Thunder of WLAF/NFL Europa, the Rage of the XFL, the current Tuskers), to our ice hockey teams (the Solar Bears and Seals), to spring training (Twins, Astros, Braves), to soccer (the Lions and Sundogs), and various alternative sports (roller hockey’s Orlando Jackals, Xtreme Baseball, RollerJam, hosting WCW and TNA wrestling).

I hope to see a lot of you at the Amway Arena for the Titans home opener on Friday. I think it will be a great sport. If you miss ice hockey, you’ll love indoor lacrosse. There are a lot of similarities, except you don’t use skates.

Here’s hoping for many years of sporting joy and happiness, and an enlightened new decade where Orlando and sports raise each other.

So, now that I’ve finished rambling about a brief (and hardly complete) history of Sports in Orlando, I’ll tell you what we DO have:

FLORIDA TUSKERS — This is our dynamite United Football League team, playing the best of all the new league’s teams. We can dominate. We can come from behind. We can do it all. The problem is, we won’t be doing it in Orlando any more this year. With a short home-and-away schedule, we’ve already played all our home games. Fortunately, our 4-0 record gives us an automatic berth already in the first UFL Championship Game, Friday, November 27 at 3pm EST in Las Vegas. It’s on Versus, so if you have DirecTV, head to a bar. I recommend The Clubhouse for this, since they have both Bright House and DirecTV.

The team doesn’t have an actual team website yet. The UFL is more focused on promoting the whole league this first year, which isn’t a bad strategy. For next season the team will begin a marketing blitz complete with individual colors and, hopefully, their own website.

ORLANDO TITANS — Lacrosse is a surprisingly strong sport in Orlando-area high schools, and the Titans play the National Lacrosse League, an indoor brand of LAX. Before June 10th of this year, they were the New York Titans, but moved down here to give us a shot at the game. They will begin the 2010 season on January 8 hosting Philadelphia at the Amway Arena, and will have a 16-game schedule, 8 home and 8 away. Single-game tickets are $20-35, all lower bowl, and season tickets are $99-250. They are also selling corporate sponsorship packs in two sections with four season tickets given with each sponsorship pack.

This team is serious. They even have a radio contract with ESPN 1080 the Team (AM 1080 WHOO) to air every game. That’s something the Tuskers don’t even have yet. And Lacrosse is truly an exciting game. Give it a try!

CENTRAL FLORIDA KRAZE — The Kraze are an outdoor soccer team in the United Soccer Leagues’ Premier Development League, which is the top amateur flight in soccer in the United States. It’s the fourth tier of soccer competition in our country. They won the 2004 National Championship for the PDL. They play at a soccer complex up in Sanford, and run a full academy with boys and girls youth teams. The season is usually March through July, with single-game tickets at $8 for adults and $4 for kids, parking free, with a whole-family season pass (up to 5 people for each game I think) for $100.

FLORIDA ELITE SOCCER LEAGUE — The Florida Elite Soccer League is a statewide amateur soccer league affiliated with the U.S. Adult Soccer Association, placing it in the 5th tier of soccer. It is active and growing, and it is eligible to submit teams for regional qualifiers to the U.S. Open Cup. I am trying to contact them for more information, as their season ended in August and they do not have individual team websites. They do have a team in Orlando, called Orlando F.C., which currently plays in the same place the Kraze play, but that may change as the FESL apparently has some big plans for 2010 and 2011 which include Orlando being in the top tier of a multi-tier statewide league.

ORLANDO PREDATORS — As I said, plans are in place for a new Arena Football league, called Arena Football 1. It is an expansion of the league called Arena Football 2 (af2), which survived the downfall of the full Arena Football League, for which it was its minor league, and unlike the AFL actually played in 2009. They are reorganizing to form AF1, which features 15 teams right now (including the Predators and a second AFL team, the Arizona Rattlers), and may consider a two-tier system with 11 more teams having submitted applications to join.  The league itself doesn’t have a website, however, so I would not fully bank on the Predators being back until concrete plans, like a league website and schedule, appear. Regardless, the new Amway Center (opening in 2010) was designed to better accomodate Arena Football, so it would be a shame for one of the crown jewels of Orlando’s sports scene to go down for good.

(Un)fortunately, our War on I-4 rivals, the Tampa Bay Storm, look to have folded. Their website is gone, and only rumors of an AF1 application remain.