Ann-Renée Desbiens

Ann-Renée Desbiens arrived at the 2022 Beijing Olympics and made 38 saves on 40 shots in the gold medal game against the United States. That performance capped a tournament in which she made five starts for Canada and set a Canadian Olympic record — for men's or women's competition — with 51 saves in a single game. The gold added to a silver she had won at the 2018 Games, and she has since accumulated three gold and two silver medals across five Women's World Championship appearances (2015, 2021, 2022, 2023).

The Clermont, Québec native built the foundation for that international career at the University of Wisconsin, where she played four NCAA seasons and finished with 99 wins and 56 career shutouts — an NCAA record in either men's or women's hockey. In 2015–16 she broke the NCAA single-season shutout record with 21 and was a top-three finalist for the Patty Kazmaier Award. The following season she won the award outright after leading the country with 17 shutouts, 29 wins, a 0.71 goals-against average, and a .963 save percentage. Before joining the PWHL, Desbiens played with the PWHPA from 2019 to 2023, winning the Secret Cup in both 2021 and 2023.

Now wearing number 35 for the Montréal Victoire, Desbiens posted a .955 save percentage and a 1.11 goals-against average in the 2024–25 PWHL regular season, setting league records in both categories and tying Boston's Aerin Frankel for the league record of 19 wins. She also recorded seven shutouts, one behind Frankel's new single-season mark.

Ahead of the 2025 PWHL playoffs, Desbiens spoke with InGoal Magazine about how she approaches high-pressure moments Pro Tips with Ann-Renée Desbiens. Her answer centered on preparation. "I feel like now I can just be the average me every game," she told InGoal. "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." She described a shift in how she thinks about playoff hockey: rather than seeking an elevated performance, she and her team had built enough consistency that a collective average game is sufficient. "Preparation is the biggest thing. If you've done everything to prepare yourself — your body, your mind — to get to that moment, then you get to just enjoy it," she said Pro Tips with Ann-Renée Desbiens.

That philosophy about preparation extends back to how Desbiens learned to approach practice itself. In an earlier conversation with InGoal Pro Tips with Ann-Renée Desbiens, she described how she used to struggle with the wide-open, goalie-unfriendly drills that appear regularly in team practices — 3-on-0s and 5-on-0s in particular. "If you met me when I was a little younger, probably my coaches would say I wasn't the best practice goalie so that had to change the past few years," she said. Her solution was to identify specific technical focal points within those drills — depth management, save selection, crease positioning — so that even when goals were scored, she could evaluate her own execution independently of the outcome. She also described building accountability with teammates, asking them to keep the drills realistic enough to be useful. "We talk a lot as athletes that you play like your practice," she said, "so if you don't compete in practice, you can't expect to compete in a game."

Desbiens also appeared on the InGoal Radio podcast InGoal Radio Episode 117 with Ann-Renée Desbiens. InGoal Magazine has covered Ann-Renée Desbiens in one podcast appearance and two InGoal articles.