Ann-Renée Desbiens

Ann-Renée Desbiens made 38 saves on 40 shots in the 2022 Beijing Olympics gold medal game against the United States — a performance that capped a tournament in which she set a Canadian Olympic record, across men's and women's hockey, with 51 saves in a single game. Those numbers arrived after a career built from the ground up in Clermont, Québec, a path that Desbiens herself once doubted would lead to professional hockey at all.

Desbiens wore number 35 for Wisconsin across four NCAA seasons, finishing with 99 wins, a 0.89 goals-against average, a .955 save percentage, and 56 career shutouts — an NCAA record for either men's or women's hockey. Her senior season alone produced 17 shutouts, 29 wins, a 0.71 GAA, and a .963 save percentage, earning her the Patty Kazmaier Award in 2017. A year earlier, in 2015–16, she had broken the NCAA single-season shutout record with 21 and was a top-three finalist for the same award.

From Wisconsin, Desbiens went on to represent Canada five times at the World Championships, accumulating three gold medals and two silver medals. She appeared at two Winter Olympics, in 2018 and 2022, winning one gold and one silver. After the end of the previous professional league structure, she played with the PWHPA from 2019 to 2023, winning the Secret Cup in both 2021 and 2023.

When the PWHL launched, Desbiens joined the Montréal Victoire. In the 2025–26 regular season, she set PWHL records with a .955 save percentage and a 1.11 goals-against average, and tied the league record with 19 wins, adding seven shutouts. In the playoffs that followed, she helped Montreal eliminate the two-time defending champion Minnesota Freeze in a semifinal series, finishing with a .940 save percentage after dropping the opener 5–4 in overtime and winning the next three games by scores of 1–0, 2–1, and 2–1.

The approach behind those numbers is something Desbiens has discussed at length with InGoal. In Pro Tips with Ann-Renée Desbiens, she described how she once struggled as a practice goalie — frustrated by the wide-open 3-on-0 and 5-on-0 drills that offer goalies little to work with — and how she addressed that by finding specific technical focal points within each drill rather than treating them as throwaway repetitions. "We talk a lot as athletes that you play like your practice, so if you don't compete in practice, you can't expect to compete in a game," she said. "It's not like a switch you turn on and off."

That philosophy of preparation also informs how she approaches high-stakes games. In Pro Tips with Ann-Renée Desbiens, she told InGoal that the goal entering the playoffs is not to do more, but to trust that consistent work through the regular season means the average version of herself is sufficient. "I feel like now I can just be the average me every game," she said. "As an athlete to know the average you is good enough takes away from thinking you have to make a crazy save or dive because that's often when you're going to let the weak one in."

Her mental approach within games involves deliberate decompression between whistles. In Smile Between Whistles: the Mental Reset that Fuels Desbiens, she described using TV timeouts and stoppages to laugh, connect with teammates, and reset — treating each puck drop as a fresh trigger to refocus rather than attempting to sustain total concentration for three hours. "Your nervous system takes a beat down if you're always like, go, go, go," she said. Her motivation for maintaining that enjoyment is direct: "For someone that didn't think I was ever going to be able to play professional hockey, I'm going to enjoy every single second."

InGoal Magazine has covered Ann-Renée Desbiens in one podcast appearance and three InGoal articles.