Ann-Renée Desbiens

When Canada faced the United States in the gold medal game at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, Ann-Renée Desbiens stood between the pipes and made 38 saves on 40 shots. Earlier in that same tournament, she set a Canadian Olympic record — across both men's and women's hockey — with 51 saves in a single game. Those two performances came at the end of a journey that began in Clermont, Québec, and ran through the record books of American college hockey before arriving on the largest stages the sport offers.

Desbiens spent four seasons in the NCAA at the University of Wisconsin, finishing with numbers that remain unmatched at any level of college hockey. Her 56 career shutouts set an NCAA record — men's or women's — as did her 21 shutouts in the 2015–16 season alone, a single-season mark that also earned her a top-three Patty Kazmaier Award finalist nod that year. Her senior season, 2016–17, brought the Kazmaier Award itself: she led the country with 17 shutouts, 29 wins, a 0.71 goals-against average, and a .963 save percentage. Across her four Wisconsin seasons she finished with 99 wins, a career GAA of 0.89, and a save percentage of .955.

On the international stage, Desbiens has appeared in two Winter Olympics — Pyeongchang in 2018 and Beijing in 2022 — collecting a silver medal at the former and a gold medal at the latter. She has also competed in five IIHF Women's World Championships (2015, 2021, 2022, 2023), accumulating three gold medals and two silver medals across those appearances. Her Olympic record of 51 saves in a game and her five starts at the 2022 Games, including that gold medal performance, cemented her role as Canada's top international starter. Wikipedia also notes she won a silver medal at the 2026 Winter Olympics, bringing her total Olympic medal count to two.

Between the end of her NCAA career and the founding of the PWHL, Desbiens competed with the Professional Women's Hockey Players Association from 2019 to 2023, winning the Secret Cup in both 2021 and 2023.

She now wears number 35 for the Montréal Victoire. Her 2024–25 PWHL regular season produced a .955 save percentage and a 1.11 goals-against average, tying for a league-record 19 wins with seven shutouts, all of which set or matched PWHL records. Her career PWHL win total has reached 41, another league record. In the 2025 playoffs, after dropping the opening game of the semifinal series against the Minnesota Freeze 5–4 in overtime, Desbiens finished the series with a .940 save percentage, with Montreal's three wins coming by scores of 1–0, 2–1, and 2–1 to advance to the Walter Cup Finals.

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

Ahead of the 2025 PWHL playoffs, Desbiens spoke with InGoal about what she described as a mental reset between whistles — a deliberate practice of letting go between stoppages rather than trying to maintain concentration for a full three hours. "You can't be focused for three hours. It's so hard mentally," she told InGoal ^[1]. She described using the moment of a puck drop as her trigger to re-engage, and the period between play as space to decompress. That piece, by Kevin Woodley, covers her approach to managing focus through a full playoff run ^[1].

In a separate InGoal conversation ahead of the playoffs, Desbiens addressed the pressure of postseason hockey through the lens of preparation, sharing advice that extends from youth hockey to the professional game ^[2]. "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 ^[2]. That article also touches on her work with new CCM TACKS equipment, with more coverage on that subject to follow.

An earlier InGoal piece, published just after her 2022 Olympic gold, goes into detail on how Desbiens rethought her approach to practice — specifically how she learned to find technical and tactical focal points during drills that aren't goalie-friendly, a habit she credits as part of her development ^[3]. That piece is available to InGoal subscribers ^[3].

Desbiens also appeared on the InGoal Radio podcast in April 2021 ^[4], and was part of an earlier episode alongside Brianne McLaughlin and Katie Burt in February 2020 ^[5].