Welcome to Play D.A. New York. This will be the best one-stop shop for Upstate and Western New York sports anywhere. And it will all be perfectly engineered for your phone. Built by me, Damon Amendolara, for the most passionate region of fans in the country.

If you’re an Orange Fizz reader, this will be a massive upgrade for your mobile experience. The site is 100x faster than the old one, and offers a much cleaner, less muddled, readership experience. Plus, all of my YouTube videos are easily embedded into stories instead of awkward pop-up windows. Same staff. Same domain name. Upgraded performance. You will love it.

To explain why I folded the Fizz into a massive new site called “Play D.A. New York,” I have to go back almost thirty years, to 1997, when I first arrived at Syracuse and began working for WAER, Z89 and the Daily Orange. I’ve been covering Orange sports in some capacity ever since. In 2009, I launched the Orange Fizz as a daily home for Syracuse fans, built on professional standards but with a voice that was unapologetically my own. The site grew. I added staff. And somewhere along the way, we found a niche that didn’t really exist yet in Syracuse coverage: daily recruiting coverage, the kind bigger programs in the SEC and among the sport’s blue bloods had always had. Other college sports media treated high school prospects like the big deal their diehard fanbases already knew they were. Syracuse never had that before us. I believe the Orange Fizz helped usher in an entirely new era of how this program gets covered, one where other outlets, including the Post-Standard/Syracuse.com, eventually followed suit and started treating recruiting as a real, regular part of the Syracuse sports conversation instead of something reserved for programs with a different kind of fan culture.

Fast forward to today, and the media landscape looks nothing like it did back then. Newspapers are on life support. Local radio stations get their budgets cut every year. Local TV stations can’t afford to keep a full sports staff anymore. So the natural question becomes: where does that coverage go? Increasingly, it falls to digital outlets, but too often those outlets don’t carry the same standards or rigor that legacy media once did. That gap is real, and it’s only getting wider across upstate and Western New York.

That’s the gap we’re here to close.

For the Orange Fizz, nothing changes except the design of the website itself. You’re still getting daily, elite Syracuse coverage from me and a staff of Syracuse journalism students learning the craft the right way. I’m also expanding that coverage onto my YouTube channel with constant Syracuse video content: sit-downs with people like Bryan Blair and Fran Brown, and postgame recap videos after every single Syracuse game.

But here’s the bigger picture. If you zoom out across the entire state of New York, the media oxygen gets sucked up by New York City. The Yankees, Mets, Giants, Jets, and Knicks get the attention, the coverage, the resources. Everything north of the city, everything above the I-84 belt, gets treated like an afterthought. It’s the single biggest problem I have with the places I’ve worked. The mentality in the building is New York City-centric, even though we’re supposed to cover the entire country. Upstate and Western New York may as well be Des Moines and Flagstaff. It’s just the reality of where the money and attention in this industry have always flowed.

So we built a catch-all home for these fans: Play D.A. New York.

The same daily approach that’s defined the Orange Fizz for seventeen years is now covering the Bills and the Sabres too. Postgame recaps, draft analysis, reaction videos to whatever’s trending, and daily written content, every single day, all under one roof. On top of that, we’re launching a high school football silo called Friday Night Films, because the next generation of stories in this state starts on Friday nights in towns that never get talked about enough.

Here’s the truth about New York sports fans outside the city: you have a reputation that spans the entire country. Bills Mafia is one of the most talked-about fan cultures in the NFL. Sabres fans stuck with this team through one of the longest playoff droughts in professional sports and never stopped showing up. The nation realized the undying passion of Sabres fans during the ’26 Stanley Cup playoffs. Syracuse basketball still pulls 20K-30K people into the Dome. You are, by any honest measure, some of the most passionate and loyal fans in American sports. It’s time the coverage actually matched that passion, and it’s time you got it delivered the way you actually consume media now: on your phone, your laptop, your tablet, your smart TV, whenever and wherever you want it.

That’s what Play D.A. New York is. Welcome aboard. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover, and we’re just getting started.