Ann-Renée Desbiens

When Ann-Renée Desbiens walked off the ice in Beijing having stopped 38 of 40 shots in the gold medal game against the United States, she completed a path that, by her own account, she once doubted was possible. "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," she told InGoal Magazine ^[1]. The goaltender from Clermont, Québec has since made that disbelief look difficult to justify.

Desbiens spent four seasons at the University of Wisconsin before her professional career began, and the numbers she left behind remain in the record books. Her 56 career shutouts set an NCAA record across both men's and women's hockey, and she finished with 99 wins, a career GAA of 0.89, and a save percentage of .955. In her junior season, she broke the NCAA single-season shutout record with 21 and was a top-three finalist for the Patty Kazmaier Award. Her senior year brought the award itself, after she led the country with 17 shutouts, 29 wins, a 0.71 GAA, and a .963 save percentage.

Her Olympic career spans two Games. She appeared at the 2018 Winter Olympics and returned as Canada's starter in 2022, making five starts in Beijing including the gold medal game. In that tournament she also set a Canadian Olympic record — men's or women's — with 51 saves in a single game. She later earned a silver medal at the 2026 Winter Olympics. At the World Championship level, she has appeared five times (2015, 2021, 2022, 2023) and collected three gold medals and two silver medals. Between Olympic cycles, she played in the PWHPA from 2019 to 2023, winning the Secret Cup in 2021 and 2023.

In the PWHL, Desbiens plays for the Montréal Victoire and has built a record that includes 41 career wins and PWHL records for career save percentage and goals-against average. In the 2025–26 regular season she posted a .955 save percentage and 1.11 GAA, tying the league record with 19 wins. That spring she backstopped Montréal through a semifinal series against the two-time defending champion Minnesota Freeze — recovering from a 5-4 overtime loss in Game 1 to finish the series with a .940 save percentage, the final three wins coming by scores of 1-0, 2-1, and 2-1.

InGoal Magazine has covered the mental side of her game in depth. In a 2026 piece ^[2], she described her approach to playoff pressure: "I feel like now I can just be the average me every game... 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." A companion piece from that same period explores a practice she calls smiling between whistles — using the natural pauses in a game as deliberate mental resets rather than trying to sustain concentration from puck drop to final buzzer ^[1]. "Your nervous system takes a beat down if you're always like, go, go, go," she said. "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.'"

Her relationship with practice itself is also part of the record. In a 2022 piece available to InGoal members ^[3], she described how she learned to reframe the goalie-unfriendly drills — 3-on-0s, 5-on-0s — that once frustrated her, finding specific technical focal points to pursue rather than fixating on outcomes. That conversation, which also touched on her path to Olympic gold, originated on the InGoal Radio podcast ^[4], where she appeared in 2021. She also appeared alongside Brianne McLaughlin and Katie Burt on an earlier episode ^[5].

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