Ann-Renée Desbiens

When Ann-Renée Desbiens made 38 saves on 40 shots in the gold medal game of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, she completed a run in which she set a Canadian Olympic record — men's or women's — with 51 saves in a single game earlier in the same tournament. Those five starts in Beijing, including the gold medal final against the United States, placed the Clermont, Québec native at the center of one of the most decorated stretches in Canadian women's hockey history.

Desbiens, who wears number 35 for the Montréal Victoire, was born April 10, 1994, and came through the program at the University of Wisconsin, where she played four NCAA seasons and finished with 99 wins, a 0.89 goals-against average, a .955 save percentage, and 56 career shutouts — an NCAA record for men's or women's hockey. Along the way, she broke the NCAA single-season shutout record with 21 in 2015–16, reaching the top-three finalist list for the Patty Kazmaier Award that same year. Her senior season, 2016–17, brought the award itself: she led the country with 17 shutouts, 29 wins, a 0.71 GAA, and a .963 save percentage.

Her Olympic career spans two Games. At the 2018 Pyeongchang Olympics, Canada won silver. At Beijing in 2022, Canada took gold, with Desbiens the starter through the final. She also competed at five IIHF Women's World Championships — 2015, 2021, 2022, and 2023 — collecting three gold and two silver medals across those appearances, for a total of six World Championship medals. The 2026 Winter Olympics brought another silver medal, per Wikipedia records.

During the years between the PWHL's formation and her NCAA career, Desbiens played with the PWHPA from 2019 to 2023, winning the Secret Cup in both 2021 and 2023. Since the PWHL's launch she has established herself as one of the league's record holders: in the 2025–26 regular season she posted a .955 save percentage and a 1.11 goals-against average, both PWHL records, and tied Boston's Aerin Frankel for the league record of 19 wins, adding seven shutouts. Her career win total reached 41, also a PWHL record.

In the 2026 PWHL Playoffs, Desbiens and the Victoire defeated the two-time defending champion Minnesota Freeze in a semifinal series that opened with a 5–4 overtime loss before Montreal won three straight — 1–0, 2–1, and 2–1 — advancing to the Walter Cup Finals. Desbiens finished the series with a .940 save percentage. Ahead of those playoffs, she spoke with InGoal Magazine about the mental side of her game, specifically her practice of finding moments to smile and disconnect between whistles as a way of managing focus across an entire game. ^[1]

That 2026 piece was part of a broader conversation in which she also addressed how she approaches high-stakes games — her view that preparation during the regular season removes the need to "do more" in the playoffs, and that knowing "the average you is good enough" reduces pressure rather than adding to it. ^[2] The advice she shared in ^[2] traces directly back to lessons she described earlier in her career around learning to be a more productive practice goalie, including how she reframed frustrating non-goalie-friendly drills by identifying specific technical focal points within them — a topic she addressed with InGoal in a piece available to InGoal members. ^[3]

Desbiens has also appeared on the InGoal Radio podcast twice. In episode 117, recorded in April 2021 ^[4], she joined InGoal to discuss her career and development, and she was part of a broader goaltender roundtable in episode 55 alongside Brianne McLaughlin and Katie Burt. ^[5]

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