Ann-Renée Desbiens

Ann-Renée Desbiens grew up in Clermont, Québec, and went on to rewrite the NCAA record books as a goaltender at the University of Wisconsin. Over four seasons, she finished with 99 wins, a 0.89 goals-against average, a .955 save percentage, and 56 career shutouts — a record across all of NCAA hockey, men's or women's. In her junior season she broke the NCAA single-season shutout record with 21, and as a senior she led the country with 17 shutouts, 29 wins, a 0.71 goals-against average, and a .963 save percentage, earning the Patty Kazmaier Award in 2017.

On the international stage, Desbiens has appeared in two Winter Olympics — 2018 and 2022 — and five World Championships, collecting a combined five gold and silver medals across both tournaments. At the 2022 Beijing Games she made five starts for Canada, including the gold medal game against the United States, where she stopped 38 of 40 shots. Earlier in that same tournament she set a Canadian Olympic record — men's or women's — with 51 saves in a single game.

After her NCAA career, Desbiens played with the PWHPA from 2019 to 2023, winning the Secret® Cup in both 2021 and 2023. She is now the starting goaltender for the Montréal Victoire in the PWHL, where she has set league records with a .955 save percentage and a 1.11 goals-against average in a single season, tying the PWHL record of 19 wins and recording seven shutouts. She also holds the PWHL record with 41 career wins.

During Montreal's 2026 playoff run to the Walter Cup Finals, Desbiens dropped the opening game of the semifinal series against Minnesota 5-4 in overtime before finishing the series with a .940 save percentage, including a 2-1 series-clinching win. In conversation with InGoal ahead of those playoffs Pro Tips with Ann-Renée Desbiens, Desbiens described the value of not changing her approach when stakes rise. "I feel like now I can just be the average me every game," she said, noting that trying to make extraordinary saves in big moments is often what leads to preventable goals. "It's understanding the balance between, yes, it's important to make timely and big saves, but there's also a way to keep it simple and more in control."

The mental framework extends into how she manages focus within a game. In a separate piece Smile Between Whistles: the Mental Reset that Fuels Desbiens, Desbiens explained that she uses the time between whistles to deliberately disconnect — looking at what's on the screen, laughing with teammates — before treating each puck drop as a trigger to re-engage. "Your nervous system takes a beat down if you're always like, go, go, go," she told InGoal. "So I think for me, it's this ability to let go when I don't need to focus, and just when the puck drops, it's like, 'okay, game on again.'" She described the philosophy as rooted in something personal: "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."

That sense of perspective also runs through how she has approached the practice environment. As she shared with the InGoal Radio Podcast Pro Tips with Ann-Renée Desbiens around the time of the 2022 Olympics, she used to struggle with drills such as 3-on-0s and 5-on-0s, finding them frustrating and of little value. Her solution was to find specific technical focal points — depth management, save selection, crease trajectory — that gave her something concrete to work on regardless of how the drill unfolded. She also described building an honest dialogue with teammates about what actually helps a goaltender improve. "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."

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