Kitchens ranked top ten in the long jump at both the American indoor and outdoor championships in his first year as a professional in 2006. He competed sparingly in the 2007 and 2008 seasons. He re-emerged in 2009 with a fourth-place finish at the USA Indoor Track and Field Championships, followed by a podium finish at the USA Outdoors, taking third with a mark of 8.23 m. Typically this would have gained him a spot for the World Championships squad, but because the mark was wind-aided and he did not possess the "A" qualifying standard, he did not get called up. He began to compete in Europe for the first time that year and set a new best of 7.98 m at a meeting in Salamanca, Spain. He failed to build on this in 2010 and he finished out of the top ten at the USA Outdoors with his season's best mark of 7.64 m.