Ann-Renée Desbiens

When Ann-Renée Desbiens made 38 saves on 40 shots in the gold medal game at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, she capped a tournament in which she had already rewritten the record books — setting a Canadian Olympic record, men's or women's, with 51 saves in a single game. The performance put a finishing stamp on a career arc that had begun in Clermont, Québec, and wound through the most decorated goaltending résumé in NCAA history.

Desbiens spent four seasons between the pipes at the University of Wisconsin, finishing with a .955 save percentage, a 0.89 goals-against average, 99 wins, and 56 career shutouts — a record that stands across all of NCAA hockey, men's or women's. Her senior season, 2016–17, brought the Patty Kazmaier Award, the sport's top individual prize, after she led the country with 17 shutouts, 29 wins, a 0.71 goals-against average, and a .963 save percentage. The season before that, she had already broken the NCAA single-season shutout record with 21 and been named a top-three Kazmaier finalist.

Her international résumé runs alongside those university years and beyond. Desbiens has appeared in five World Championships — 2015, 2021, 2022, and 2023 — collecting three gold medals and two silver. At the Olympics, she has appeared twice officially in competition (2018, 2022), earning a silver in Pyeongchang and gold in Beijing, and subsequently won a silver medal at the 2026 Winter Olympics. During the years between those Games, she competed with the PWHPA from 2019 to 2023, winning the Secret Cup in both 2021 and 2023.

Now wearing number 35 for the Montréal Victoire in the PWHL, Desbiens, 32, set league records during the 2025–26 regular season with a .955 save percentage and a 1.11 goals-against average, tying Boston's Aerin Frankel for a league-record 19 wins while posting seven shutouts. She then carried that form into the PWHL playoffs, backstopping Montréal past the two-time defending champion Minnesota Freeze and into the Walter Cup Finals. After dropping the series opener 5–4 in overtime, her team won the next three games by scores of 1–0, 2–1, and 2–1, and Desbiens finished the series with a .940 save percentage.

InGoal has documented her thinking across multiple pieces. In a 2022 article available to InGoal subscribers ^[1], Desbiens discussed how she overhauled her approach to practice — particularly the wide-open drills that had frustrated her earlier in her career — as part of her preparation for Beijing. The piece draws directly from her appearance on the InGoal Radio Podcast. Ahead of the 2026 playoffs, InGoal published two additional pieces exploring the mental frameworks she now applies to big games. In one ^[2], she outlined why she believes the goal in the postseason is to play an average game rather than try to elevate — "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." In the other ^[3], she described the deliberate mental resets she uses between whistles throughout a game: "It's every puck drop. If I let in a goal, it's the next face off... When the puck is dropped, it's like 'okay, it's work time,' but then it's okay to be enjoying yourself in between."

That piece also contained a line that frames her perspective on the professional game she once doubted she would have: "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."

Desbiens has also appeared twice on InGoal Radio — on episode 117 in April 2021 ^[4] and on episode 55 in February 2020 ^[5] alongside Brianne McLaughlin and Katie Burt.

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