Bournemouth School should be challenging for a medal for the second year running at the England Schools Relay Championships in Southampton next month.

The team of Oscar Esposti, Noah Vides, Dan Speers and Jamie Gray are ranked third in the intermediate boys’ medley relay behind swim scholarship schools Millfield and Plymouth College and eighth in the freestyle.

The first three already have an ESSA bronze medal after they and Barney Fry came third in last year’s junior boys’ medley relay final at Stockport.

Esposti and Gray are coached by Swim Bournemouth while Vides and Speers were in the Poole SC team that became medley relay champions at the National Age Group Championships in July.

Several other Dorset schools will also be heading for Southampton on November 26.

Canford qualified in 13th and 15th places in the senior girls’ medley and freestyle respectively with Thomas Hardye School, Dorchester, seeded 10th and 14th in the same events.

Christchurch’s Twynham School line up 14th in the junior boys’ medley and freestyle.

In the junior girls’ events, Parkstone Grammar and Bournemouth School for Girls are ranked 15th and 16th in the medley, while the freestyle lists Weymouth’s Budmouth College, Parkstone and BSG 13th, 14th and 16th respectively.

• Seagulls water polo player Kathy Rogers is celebrating selection for the England Talent Squad for 2011-12 following two national trials at Cardiff.

The 12-year-old from New Milton has already attended her first training weekend with the squad and is now targeting the sport’s 2012 National Academy Week and possibly an international tour.

Rogers is treading in the footsteps of Seagulls team-mates Cianan Mann, Charlie Roberts and Jackson Mullins, who have been on the boys’ England Talent Squad since January and recently survived the latest cull which saw 10 players dropped from the squad.

• Former world and Commonwealth backstroke champion Katy Sexton passed on some tips from the top when she met 40 Swim Bournemouth swimmers at their Canford School training pool.

Swimmer Danielle Thwaites said: “It was very inspiring. Katy talked about her early swimming life, the highs and lows of the sport and the extreme injuries she has had to cope with.

“Her main message was: ‘If it’s tough, you’re tougher!’”