Ann-Renée Desbiens

Ann-Renée Desbiens walked off the ice in Beijing with a gold medal and a Canadian Olympic record — 51 saves in a single game — that stood across men's and women's hockey alike. Born in Clermont, Québec, and now the starting goaltender for the Montréal Victoire, Desbiens has built one of the most decorated careers in the history of women's hockey in Canada.

Her foundation was built at the University of Wisconsin, where she played four NCAA seasons and left with 99 wins, a career 0.89 goals-against average, a .955 save percentage, and 56 career shutouts — an NCAA record for any goaltender, male or female. In 2015–16 she broke the NCAA single-season shutout record with 21, earning a top-three Patty Kazmaier Award finalist nomination that year. Her senior season produced 17 shutouts, 29 wins, a 0.71 goals-against average, and a .963 save percentage, numbers that earned her the Patty Kazmaier Award in 2017.

On the international stage, Desbiens has appeared at five World Championships (2015, 2021, 2022, 2023), collecting three gold medals and two silvers, and has competed at three Winter Olympics (2018, 2022, 2026), earning a gold in Beijing, a silver at the 2026 Games, and a silver in 2018. Her five starts at the 2022 Olympics included the gold medal game against the United States, where she made 38 saves on 40 shots. During the professional gap years, she played in the PWHPA from 2019 to 2023, winning the Secret Cup in both 2021 and 2023.

In the PWHL, Desbiens has set the league record for career wins (41) and, in the 2025–26 regular season, posted a .955 save percentage and a 1.11 goals-against average that each set new PWHL records. She tied Boston's Aerin Frankel for a league-record 19 wins that season and added seven shutouts, one behind Frankel's new single-season record. In the 2026 PWHL Playoffs, Desbiens backstopped Montréal past the two-time defending champion Minnesota Freeze in a best-of-five semifinal, finishing the series with a .940 save percentage after dropping the opener 5–4 in overtime and winning the next three by scores of 1–0, 2–1, and 2–1.

Desbiens has spoken openly with InGoal about the mental side of her game. In a 2026 article ahead of the playoffs ^[1], she described her practice of using the moments between whistles — TV timeouts, faceoffs, any pause in play — as deliberate resets rather than extensions of the pressure: "You can't be focused for three hours. It's so hard mentally." The puck dropping, she explained, is the trigger to re-engage: "It's every puck drop. If I let in a goal, it's the next face off." That same piece covers how she came to embrace smiling and laughing on the ice as a performance tool, not a distraction — available at ^[1].

A companion piece published just ahead of those same playoffs ^[2] has Desbiens on the subject of not trying to do more when the stakes rise — advice rooted in years of international competition and now available to InGoal subscribers. Her 2022 contribution to InGoal ^[3], recorded around the time of the Beijing Games, traces how she overhauled her approach to practice — moving past frustration with goalie-unfriendly drills toward finding specific technical focal points — and is available in full to InGoal members. Desbiens also appeared on the InGoal Radio podcast in 2021 ^[4] and in a multi-goaltender episode in early 2020 ^[5].

InGoal Magazine has covered Ann-Renée Desbiens in two podcast appearances and three InGoal articles.